


Black Tide

by phainopepla



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, F/M, Gray Jedi, I Cannot Be Trusted With Them, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Inexplicable Addition Of Sith With Baked Goods, Jedi, Knights of Ren - Freeform, Korriban: Vacation Destination, Planet Is Not In A Relationship With Anyone Though, Sith, Slow Burn, Someone Please Take These Tags Away From Me, The Dark Side Literally Has Cookies, Vaguely Pale Sith?, Vaguely Sentient Planet, What's The Equivalent Of Gray Jedi If You're A Sith?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-02-28 12:59:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 38
Words: 65,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phainopepla/pseuds/phainopepla
Summary: When a champion of the Dark rises, a champion of the Light rises to meet them. But the Force is about balance above all, and if the champion of the Light begins to fall, the Dark finds itself in a very awkward position...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In the words of Luke Skywalker, "This is not going to go the way you think."
> 
> This will likely whip wildly between funny and pathos. That's just how I write. I used to fight those tendencies, but hell, life's too short.

One of the many things that they do not tell young Jedi in training is how powerfully they will be drawn to Sith, if they meet them.

There’s a reason for that, of course. You do not point the moth at open flame. The Jedi order has always had a tendency to lock down emotions and pretend that they don’t exist, to hand-wave the Sith away as a tiresome requirement of universal balance.

The Sith, in this, are perhaps wiser. In the old days of Korriban, they warned their students about the Jedi.

_You will be drawn to them. Power calls to power. They will call out to you like a dry land calls for rain._

_If you listen, if you yield, you will pour yourself out into that dry land and nothing will be left behind. Jedi will bind you with their words and their weakness._

_If you listen to them for too long, you will bind_ yourself _and be sickeningly grateful for the chance._

_Do not talk to them unless you are utterly confident in your power to bind them to you instead._

_It is best to kill them quickly._

And young Sith nodded, only half-listening, and plotted to put knives in their masters’ backs. And young Jedi listened very, very earnestly to their masters’ warnings about the dark and vowed to never fail and never fall.

There are other things that their masters knew, Sith and Jedi both. The Jedi masters whispered it only to each other, and the Sith whispered it only to their Jedi captives in the dark. Things that students would have to find out for themselves.

Light and dark. Two magnets with opposite poles, drawn together by a force greater than either of them.

 

The counter to this is that if you try to force the same poles of a magnet together, they repel each other violently.

The Sith killed each other, more or less as a hobby.

The Jedi order, while they frowned on that sort of thing, did have quite a lot of masters that retired to distant, godforsaken planets, unable to stand other Jedi for more than brief social occasions. There were Force ghosts, of course, but they usually went away if you threw enough rocks through them.

None of which matters now. Korriban is a tomb, of interest only to archaeologists. Skywalker died, depending on who you ask, on a craggy rock or a salt plain red as human blood. (Probably there are still Sith somewhere, who no longer observe the foolish Rule of Two. Sith are like cockroaches, although generally they dress better.)

The only thing that matters is that there is something almost like a Jedi and something not entirely unlike a Sith left in the galaxy, circling one another, and it remains to be seen which one is the moth, and which one will be the flame.

* * *

 

Rey hates everything in general, but the ancient Jedi in particular.

The texts that she is trying to decipher were written in some language so ancient that the computers had to translate it, and no matter how many times she goes back to the words, they don’t change.

And she has no idea what they meant.

She understands all the words, of course. She isn’t stupid. But they are _useless._ They seem to be advising that the best thing to do, in any situation, was nothing at all.

No wonder Luke Skywalker had ended his days on that damnable island, if this was what he had to work with. The books practically told you to sit still and wait for moss to grow on you.

She runs her hands over the pages, trying to pull out some hidden meaning, some faint ghost within the pages that would tell her what to do next.

Nothing. Paper and hide, parchment and leather. No hidden secrets.

 _If you are angry, stop and think_ —very well, that wasn’t bad advice. But then: _Never act unless you are certain, and if you are certain, be particularly wary, for certainty is a trap._

Rey wants to scream.

She closes her eyes and tilts her head back against the bulkhead and there it is, the sudden unwelcome whisper in her ears, the connection that hadn’t faded with Snoke’s death.

_Shit._

She’s gotten better at blocking it off, but when she is tired or frustrated, sometimes it still slips through. Her only consolation is that Kylo Ren doesn’t seem any happier about it than she did.

She feels the moment that he recognizes her, the half-heard sigh.

_Oh. It’s you._

“Not by choice!” she growls under her breath.

_It never is, is it?_

She can see him now, leaning against another featureless bulkhead, half in shadow. The scar on his face pulls as he turns his head.

“I hate you,” she tells him conversationally.

_I know._

They are both waiting for the connection to fade. When it doesn’t, the silence stretchs out until it borders on excruciating.

 _Well._ She sees him tilt his head back. _How goes the Resistance?_

Small talk. Dear ghosts of space, he is trying to make small talk. She doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or cry or scream.

“Like I’d tell _you_. How is the First Order?”

 _Oh, you know._ _Hux is a worm. Phasma’s got an eyepatch. We shelled a moon into oblivion the other day._

“You _what?”_

_It wasn’t a very good moon._

She bares her teeth. “Monster.”

He bows his head, accepting this as tribute.

Another silence. She can feel the roiling dark on the far side of it, and wonders if he sees her light the same way.

_No. You’re like crystal._

“What?”

He shows her. A lightsaber crystal, blinding white, the interior opaque with a hundred internal facets.

“That’s how you see me?”

_Are you surprised? You’re a weapon._

_Like me._

“I am nothing like you!” Rey snarls, and snaps the connection between them.

 

 

She sits in the cargo hold of the Falcon, trying to get her breathing back under control.

The first time the connection had flared to life, after Crait, she had screamed at him. Every obscenity she had ever learned on Jakku, and a few she made up for the occasion. She poured her rage and her anguish and her grief through the thread between them, and the damnable bastard _sat there and took it._

And then he’d smiled, just a little, and whispered _Anger is the path to the Dark Side._

She hit the air in front of her with her staff, just to wipe the smile off his face. It had worked, too. He recoiled and the connection broke, and she’d hoped that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t.

“Why are you doing this?” she hissed at him, the next time their minds touched. “Why won’t you let me go?”

She sensed surprise, and an unguarded moment of honesty.

_I’m not doing this._

“What?”

_It’s not me. I thought you were doing it._

“Why would _I_ do such a thing?”

She felt an echo of their first conversation, seen from the other side, the rage washing over the connection, as fierce as a sandstorm blowing over the wastes.

_To let me know that you were angry?_

“You’d have to be pretty stupid not to have guessed that,” she growled.

Kylo Ren laughed. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard him laugh before. She sent him her anger and her loathing again and the connection faded away, but the sound of mocking laughter rang in her ears for hours after.

Now, weeks later, she is almost used to it. She can block it off sometimes, before it even starts. Rey suspects that he’s learned to block it too, because sometimes she will feel a snatch of presence, a shadow out of the corner of her eye, and then it will be gone.

Sometimes, though, it still comes through. When one or the other is too angry or tired or frustrated

(or lonely)

to block it away.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Kylo Ren has two things he keeps well hidden, and one of them is Vader’s mask.

The other is his sense of humor.

It would astonish some people to know he has one. Truly evil people are rarely funny, though they are frequently charming. Supreme Leader Snoke, largely humorless himself, had nevertheless recognized that a sense of humor is one of the strongest shields against the dark, and had set out to destroy Ben Solo’s.

It was easy enough to do. When you are desperate for someone’s approval, and they meet every joke with cool impatience, followed by a derisive explanation of why such foolishness is inappropriate, it tends to have a dampening effect.

(It did not hurt that Darth Vader, whom Kylo idolized, had displayed all the humor of a constipated rancor. Even those who crowed about his redemption as a triumph of the light did not have much to say about his comedic timing.)

What little survived Snoke’s careful manipulation was black as char, mostly self-deprecating, and so deeply buried that the only person who is ever aware of it is Kylo Ren himself.

 

* * *

 

Kylo Ren is tired.

He is often tired, these days. He could draw on the Force to renew himself, of course, tap into that endless, eternal wellspring, but even that is fraught with peril. Drink too deep, and the Force gets inside you, remaking you, tugging bits of you to fit.

He’d had to persuade an admiral not to mutiny today. He would have preferred to kill him, but Hux had explained, in acid tones, that dreadnaughts were not easy to come by, even for the First Order. So Kylo had reached into the man’s soul through his eyes and said _You will obey_ and the admiral had fallen to his knees and begged to be allowed to serve the Order.

Space, it was tiring. He prefers smashing things. His is a power suited to destruction, not persuasion. Otherwise he would have broken Hux to heel long ago, instead of keeping him in line, day after day, with invisible fingers around his throat.

(He is almost convinced that Hux enjoys being dominated by a greater power, a thought which would disturb him if he let himself think about it too closely. The fact that the general had nearly burst into tears at Snoke’s death had been unspeakably bizarre.

Since his choices are to _not_ think about that or to sit in the bottom of the ‘fresher trying to scrub his skin clean for the next year, he carefully sets the thought aside.)

Kylo lies on his bed, fingers laced behind his head, beginning to drift off to sleep—and there she is.

The scavenger. The little desert rat.

The Jedi.

_Oh hell._

The bond between them is still as strong as the day their hands had touched. Snoke had forged it, perhaps, but it had outlived him.

She had fought it at first. Kylo gave her credit for that. She had poured her emotions down the connection, making him taste the salt of her tears, the vinegar of her disgust.

Days had passed, and every time their minds touched, he felt the same thing—a shock of recognition, and then she tried to choke him with her hate.

“Why?” she hissed at him, two weeks after the battle of Crait. “All I do is rage at you! Why won’t you leave me _alone?”_

_Perhaps I like the taste of your rage._

Silence. He’d shocked her.

He forgot, sometimes, the depth of her innocence. She had come to the Force far later than he had, and she had had a gentler teacher. She had never had her thoughts pulled from her skull and mercilessly mocked, never had her emotions turned back on her and magnified until she squirmed and broke beneath them.

He felt an urge to apologize, and squelched it immediately.

“You disgust me,” she said. Her voice shook. And here it came again, the blaze of rage, the hatred washing over him…and then under it, anguish.

He liked the cleanness of her hate, the purity of it. The anguish was new. It clawed at him where the hate had not.

_Enough,_ he said.

“You don’t frighten me,” she said, which was a lie and they both knew it.

_Don’t I? I should._

 The connection between them blazed inside his head. He caught it and turned it back.

She wanted rage? Very well. He had plenty to spare.

There is a black tide always inside him, shot through with red. He poured it down the channel between them—fury mingled with self-loathing, rage with terror, the taste of his own blood in his mouth as he lay facedown on the deckplates, his master teaching him the price of failure.

Once he might have tried to hide the fear, but there was little point to that now. Better she knew all of it, even the weakness he had forged until it was a weapon as brittle as frozen iron.

The tide rolled over her and she drowned in it. He could hear her choking for air, felt the shock as her knees hit the ground. The taste of ash filled both their mouths, as if they had shared a burning kiss.

“…no more…” she gasped, fingers splayed at her throat. “Can’t…no more…”

He stopped. He heard voices, filtered through her ears, as people on the Falcon noticed she’d fallen over.

The connection faded. He looked up and saw that two stormtroopers in the corridor had noticed him talking to himself as well, and were inching away down the hall.

He drew his lightsaber and chopped through a bulkhead, then snarled “Clean that up!” At least if they’re going to think he’s insane, they’ll think he’s dangerously insane.

Probably that’s an improvement.

* * *

 

 

The next time his mind touches Rey’s, there is an unspoken truce that neither of them will ever mention. She does not attempt to punish him with her emotions. He does not drown her in his.

Instead they trade barbs and wait for the connection to go away on its own.

Usually it does.

Tonight, Kylo Ren is in no mood for it. He runs his hand over his face, feeling the scar catch his fingertips, waiting for her to insult him and be done.

_Well?_

There is only silence over the bond between them, and the sound of breathing.

He reaches out and finds her, eyes closed, curled up on her side.

She’s asleep.

The little rat is _asleep_ and still bothering him.

He is tempted to wake her violently. He could send her an image that breaks her slumber, sends her clawing up to wakefulness with a scream in her throat. Space knows, he’s got plenty of those in his head.

But he doesn’t.

If he closes his eyes, it is like she is asleep beside him. The way it should have been.

Too late. Too late. She had rejected him. She had fought by his side and for one glorious moment, he thought he’d found his other half…then she’d walked away.          

He’ll never forgive her for that.

It occurs to him, feeling her breathe, that perhaps she wouldn’t want him to. His own words ring his ears, weighted with contempt— _Have you come to tell me you forgive me? To save my soul?_

They are not so different as all that. Perhaps his forgiveness would disgust her as much as Skywalker’s would disgust him.

He’ll never forgive himself, either, for how badly he misread the situation. She had been on the knife-edge, so close to coming over to him. If he’d just agreed to save the Resistance shuttles, to ignore them—hell, why _hadn’t_ he? A handful of people, more or less. He could have left them to rot on Crait while he bound Rey to him, body and soul, and cleaned up the loose ends later.

But he’d been so damn determined to make a clean break from the past, he’d pushed too far. Snoke would have put a slippered foot on his neck, had the old bastard still been alive, held him down to the deck and sent pain down every nerve. _You have failed, my apprentice._

Even the memory is enough to make him shudder.

But Snoke is dead. That is the important thing to remember. And Skywalker along with him. Ultimately Kylo Ren _had_ killed them both, if not as satisfyingly as he’d wished. The power to project himself across the galaxy had drained the old Jedi dry.

The scavenger girl stirs in her sleep, frowns a little. Is the connection between them enough, even her sleep, for her to feel him thinking her master’s name with venom?

He controls his breathing and lets the specific rage slip back into the black tide.

She relaxes. For a long time, there is only quiet and warmth and the soft hum of the ship around them.

Kylo Ren shifts onto his side and eases forward. He can just barely feel her, a ghostly weight of her back against his chest, her legs against his thighs.

The Force have mercy, he wants this.

Still.

And it occurs to him, on the very edge of sleep, that it might not be too late.

           


	3. Chapter 3

Rey wakes feeling better rested than she has in weeks.

Maybe it’s the time of month or the fact they’ve finally stopped jumping in and out of lightspeed to confuse pursuit.

Maybe it’s just that they’re finally nearing their destination and she won’t have to spend another night sleeping jammed into a corner of the cargo hold.

She loves her friends, she loves the other people in the Resistance, she loves General Leia. At the moment, she would love them all to _go away._

She spent years in relative solitude in the desert. Lots of things tried to kill you, but they very rarely crowded you. Rey knows that everyone means well, and she honestly doesn’t mind that there’s always an elbow sticking out or a foot where she’s trying to walk, but she’ll be very, very glad to have the _Falcon_ to herself and Chewie again.

She doesn’t mind Chewie, of course. The _Falcon_ is more his than hers. And Wookies do not feel the need to fill a silence with small talk. If he’s not at the helm, he’s in his own bunk, listening to Kashyyyk opera, which sounds like small furry animals being beaten to death with woodwinds.

She feels guilty that she’s so eager to see the back of everyone else, particularly Finn.

“It’s not for long,” she assures him. “The General sent out distress calls. No one answered. We need to find out why. Maybe those people need our help, wherever they are.”

He bites his lower lip. She makes it as easy for him as she can. “I’ll be back soon. And you have to stay here and take care of Rose. She needs you worse than I do right now.”

His shoulders slump. She doesn’t know what the relationship is between Rose and Finn, or between Finn and Poe for that matter, but whatever it is, he feels a sense of obligation about it.

And she _will_ come back. She has every intention of coming back. She just wants a few days to get her head together without people looking at her as if she’s the last Jedi in the galaxy (even though she is) and she saved them all (even though she did) and…

Well, it’s a problem.

She hasn’t even properly grieved for Luke Skywalker.

Hell, she doesn’t even know if she _needs_ to grieve for Luke Skywalker. He was a cranky old bastard and she knew him for less than a week. It hurts more to lose the legend than to lose the reality.

_He died well, though. Facing down the enemy to buy his sister time to escape. That’s a good way for a Jedi to die._

_…probably beats the hell out of living on a rock stabbing fish and milking the local wildlife._

Even this thought seems disloyal.

She wishes she could tell someone about the green milk and the weird sea creatures with udders, but how the hell do you explain something like that? Particularly at a time like this? Is she really going to go up to General Organa and say “I know you’re mourning for your brother, but I have got to tell you that his dietary choices were extremely awkward toward the end?”

No. Better to go off and do something useful. A spot check on their supposed allies. Rey knows that it doesn’t hurt that she’s a semi-Jedi and suspects that the General won’t be unhappy if someone is gently persuaded that the Resistance is worth supporting.

_A few hours_ , she tells herself. _Just a few more hours._ And yeah, she’ll stay a few days, make sure everybody’s settled into the new base, scout the planetoid and spot any dangers or any good bolt-holes in case of trouble. The _Falcon_ ’s the only working ship in the entire Resistance now, she can’t just dump them off at an old Rebel base and wave.

But that’s fine. That’s something useful to do that isn’t reading old Jedi texts or climbing into the crawlspace as soon as she feels contact with Kylo Ren coming on. She has to get somewhere that the others can’t hear her talking. Finn’s already caught her muttering under her breath at the enemy, and she doesn’t think that he’s buying that she’s just thinking out loud.

The sudden horrible coughing fit a week ago when the bastard did…whatever that was…to her had been awkward as hell. She _knew_ no one believed that it had been acid reflux. (Stupid, stupid story, but it was all she could come up with at the time. What was she going to say? “Sorry, I’ve been in psychic contact with the Supreme Leader who killed Luke Skywalker and everybody else, sorry I didn’t mention it before.” Yeah, no.)

She’d never felt anything quite like that before. It felt like she had a fever, burning hot, except that at the same time, the world around her turned blindingly cold and the only heat was coming from inside her. Everything was cold despair and only her feverish rage kept her from freezing to death.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t do anything except drown in the black tide that rose around her.

And then it had stopped, as quickly as it had come.

She’d recovered. She’d made up some lie for her friends, who clustered worriedly around her.

And later, she’d thought _Is this what Kylo Ren feels all the time…?_

           

* * *

 

           

Kylo Ren sits on the edge of the bed, feeling a quiver of anticipation in his stomach.

Now that he knows that the bond extends even to sleep, he can experiment. He has only to wait until the scavenger girl is asleep, and then he can reach out and pull her sleeping mind closer to his.

He wants this. He tries not to want it so badly, but his bed has been empty for a very long time.

It didn’t have to be, of course. There is a whole galaxy worth of whores out there, any sex or species one could desire. But Kylo had never had much interest in such passionless coupling. He would have recoiled from love, but at least he wanted lust to match his own. Once the Force wakes enough to allow you to feel another’s emotions, it’s depressing to discover that the other person is doing long division in their head and wondering if they’ll have enough money saved up after this to pay the rent.

And before that…when he was Ben Solo, lionized son of the two great heroes of the Rebellion…well. The moment he’d had wit enough to be interested, he had his pick of bedmates. Hero worship was one hell of an aphrodisiac.

When he’d finally realized what was happening, the shock had driven him into near-celibacy. It only took touching one person’s thoughts, feeling the sudden impossible weight of their expectations, realizing what had driven the handful of women before her, and he’d damn near become a monk on the spot.

Not that he has any intention of doing anything like that with Rey. Not soon, at any rate.

He wonders idly what it would be like, having her body under his. Her hands, callused from staff and lightsaber, etching a path down his back; her voice in his ear, begging him for—

The strength of his body’s reaction shocks him out of the fantasy.

_Whoa. All right._ He glances down at himself, bemused. _Let’s…not think about that._

_Get your head together. You want to seduce her mind, not rut like a fathier in heat._

_Hell, go in like that and you’ll probably scare her clear into the Unknown Regions. If she’s not a virgin, she’s the next thing to it._

He leans back against the headboard, concentrating on the least erotic thing he can, which happens to be banthas. Probably somebody out there has a bantha fetish, but it isn’t him.

Hux, maybe. Hux is the sort of person he can easily picture with an unhealthy interest in draft animals.

This potent cocktail of unpleasantness cools his ardor significantly.

_Carefully. Go carefully. Your mistake was charging in and demanding that she join you, right there and then. That she choose you over everything else._

_Like anyone would choose_ you.

His self-loathing is so familiar that he hardly registers it any longer, except to acknowledge when it has a valid point. He pushed too hard and used the wrong bait. He should have known that someone like Rey would not be tempted by power.

It is Vader, once again, who has shown him the way. Before he was Vader, his grandfather had been a Jedi knight.

Hardly anyone falls all at once. It was not until the Sith Lord Darth Sidious had offered his grandfather something he needed—the power to protect what was his—that he had finally gone crashing headlong into the dark. Before that had been months and years of careful contact, of promises made, of options weighed.

Kylo Ren had not fallen at all once either.

He can look back now and acknowledge the skill with which Snoke had manipulated him. The black tide had always been inside him, but Snoke had driven it higher, showed him how to stand inside it without drowning. Told him stories of the old Jedi and the old Sith lords, of Darth Revan who tore the galaxy in half and then fell to darkness trying again to mend it. Reasons that he _understood._

Why had he thought that an idealist like his little scavenger girl would turn her back on the light in the space of five minutes?

But the beauty of her idealism is that she will forgive him. If he is careful. If he goes slowly and does not frighten her away with the strength of the darkness in him.

If, in the end, the dark gives her something she needs.

_I can do this._

_I_ will _do this._

He waits impatiently for the connection between them to re-open.

An hour passes, then two.

Why in hell is she still awake? It’s late. Human ships keep a standard set of shifts, to keep all those lightspeed jumps and planetary rotations from turning everyone’s circadian rhythm inside out. She ought to be in bed by now.

It occurs to him suddenly that she might be, and she might not be alone.

Is there someone else? Does she have some Force-blind lover on the _Falcon?_

The black tide rises so shockingly that he had no chance of controlling it.

No. She can’t.

She is _his._

But he suddenly remembers the young man in the leather jacket, terrified out of his wits. And the Resistance, all of them that are left, the handful of pilots and mechanics. Was it one of them that Rey was thinking of, when she begged him to stop the barrage and save the transport ships?

Jealousy sears through him, savage as Force Lightning, and the world goes black and red.

When the roaring in his ears subsides, the ceiling of his quarters is destroyed. He seems to have carved it up with a lightsaber, slashing overhand until the wires and cables came bulging through.

The lights are out. The computer makes soft garbled noises at him, and finally shuts down completely.

_Dammit._

Calm.

He must remember calm.

This is not the way to convince anyone to join him, unless they are particularly fond of shipboard electronic repair.

He drops to his knees, remembering the very first lessons, breathing in, breathing out. Luke had taught him that, when he was young and had no gray in his beard, a long time ago.

The black tide slowly recedes.

_No._

_I am being stupid again._

There is no one else in Rey’s heart. No one has filled the void inside her, the aching loneliness that he can feel whenever they touch. If she has a lover, they’ve done a damn poor job at making her feel loved.

He can do _that_ , too.

Well.

Maintenance will fix his quarters in the morning. It’s not the first time. It is highly unlikely it will be the last time. (He knows for a fact that they’ve got a special code just for him—a Code Niner-Red is for lightsaber damage to the ship’s interior. It scales from Niner-Red-One for minor cosmetic up to Niner-Red-Nine for “send all the droids.” Far down in the hidden depths of his soul, he finds this amusing.)

Kylo acknowledges that he is probably too keyed up tonight to do anything of use to anyone. Temper has always been his besetting sin. He can control it, but it takes an effort of will and when you are keeping someone like Hux in line through fear alone, sometimes it’s better not to bother.

Still, he has to know. The possibility will eat him alive, otherwise.

He reaches out down the bond, deliberately, setting it alight with his mind. Somewhere, far across the starlanes, he sees Rey, slumped down in one of the crawlspaces of the Falcon, holding a laser solderer in one hand.

She is so intent that she doesn’t notice his presence at first. There’s a smear of grease on her cheek and he has a strong desire to wipe it away—strong enough that his gloved hand reaches out involuntarily and she looks up, startled.

“Huh? Oh, it’s you.”

For once she doesn’t seem angry. She is concentrating too hard on the task at hand.

_Why aren’t you asleep?_ he says, and Force give him strength, he hears his mother’s voice when he says it, complaining that he’s come in too late.

He rubs his forehead. Maybe it’s true what they say. Live long enough and you really do become your parents. Assuming you don’t kill them first.

Hell, here he is, just like his mother: heir apparent to a throne of stars, mooning around after a scruffy little criminal, who is even flying around on the goddamn _Millennium Falcon._ With the same Wookie, for god’s sake.

Ironically, his mother would have happily killed her own father, too.

He doesn’t anticipate getting invited to any Organa family reunions, but if he ever does, Kylo Ren makes a mental note to bring that fact up after dinner.

Rey is muttering something. He misses half of it, contemplating General Leia stabbing him with a dessert fork, and comes in on “…and then a Porg nested in one of the relay corridors and the nest shorted everything out and now the whole cargo hold stinks of fish and burnt feathers.”

_Ah._

She pokes at a sparking wire and holds the humming iron against it. A few seconds later, she sits back, smiling with weary satisfaction. Then her eyes narrow as she finally focuses on him and not the relay. “Wait. Why do you care? Why are _you_ awake?”

_Couldn’t sleep._

“Guilty conscience?”

_Rarely,_ he says, which is true. He feels regret often but guilt rarely, which is probably why he’s the one in the black robes and she isn’t.

“Must be nice.”

He doesn’t want to get into a conversation about guilt and regret now. His temper’s in rags again, and it’s his own damn fault.

Also, the smell of burnt Porg feathers is strong enough that he’s actually getting some kind of psychic whiff of it. Better to end it.

_Go to bed_ , he says gruffly, and snaps the connection while she’s still staring blankly into midair, wondering why he cares.


	4. Chapter 4

Fear and anger lead to hate, and hate leads to the dark side, the books said.

That’s all well and good, Rey wants to scream, but tell me how to _stop_ being afraid! Tell me how to _stop_ being angry!

The books are silent.

They’re three days out from the Resistance Base, headed to some planet or other. She’s forgotten the name. A farm world. She’s never been to one of those, but there’s an old admiral there that received Leia’s distress signal and hasn’t replied.

“Admiral Anhar was always loyal,” the General had said, gazing solemnly at the holographic image in front of her. “Always faithful. If he hasn’t come, there may be something stopping him. Find him if you can.”

Rey had nodded and then climbed into the Falcon with her heart and her skin singing _alone alone away alone finally!_

She doesn’t know how she can be so lonely (she is, she knows that) and yet so exhausted by so many other people. Apparently her heart has no idea what it wants. Which is probably the human condition, so maybe there’s nothing to be done about it.

It is not the Wookie condition. Chewie sets the lightspeed jumps, sits at the helm for an hour or two to make sure everything is going smoothly, then ambles off into the ship. Rey’s pretty sure he’s feeding the Porgs, even though he denies it.

There is not a damn thing to do in the starlanes except pore over the useless Jedi texts and try to keep from screaming.

There has to be something more. Something she is missing. Some lesson she has failed to learn that would replace the fear and the rage and the anger with peace.

_There are lessons,_ says Kylo Ren.

Rey bares her teeth. She hasn’t felt the connection building. She’s been too angry, perhaps—and that was the problem, wasn’t it?

“I have a right to be angry!” she snarls at him.

_You do._

“Anyone would be angry over the things you’ve done!”

_Certainly._

“Monster!”

_I could help you._ He sits down with his back against the wall, wherever he is, and stretches his legs out in front of him. With her eyes closed, it is like they are sitting together, without endless parsecs of space between them.

She opens her eyes at once. She does not want to feel that way.

_“You_ are going to teach me the ways of the Jedi? _Really.”_

Her sarcasm burns down the path between them, but he ignores it.

_If you like. I was trained by one._

He offers her an image. Carefully this time, not just dropped into the connection between them. A thought, held in the palm of his hand, that she can reach out and take or not, as she chooses.

She turns her head away. After a moment, disgusted with herself for her weakness, she reaches out and takes it.

It was Master Luke. Younger than he had been, with no grey in his beard, without the lines that time had gouged into his face.

“For everything, there is balance in the Force,” the Jedi said. “If you are afraid, you must find the place in the Force that balances that with courage. If you are angry, look for a peaceful place. Draw on that balance.”

The memory fades away. There is still something in Rey’s hand and she realizes, with a start, that Kylo Ren is holding it in his gloved fingers. They are very warm, even through the leather.

She jerks her hand away.

He tilts his head toward her. His dark hair falls down over his face in a curtain, but she can see amusement in his eyes.

Rey weighs her loathing against the need for information, and information wins. “That’s how you do it? When you’re angry, you find a place in the Force that…isn’t?”

_No, when_ I’m _angry, I chop through a bulkhead. But the principle is sound enough._

“Why do that? If you can reach into the Force to be calm again?”

His lips twitch. _Because I’m not a Jedi. Are you familiar with the Sith code?_

She isn’t.

_Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power. Through power I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me._

“You’re not a Sith, though,” she says.

He shrugs. _Not really. But they certainly had their moments._

“And you think that having temper tantrums and chopping through bulkheads makes you _strong?”_

He doesn’t take offense. Instead he pulls out his lightsaber and holds it up.

Rey tenses. They’ve proved that one can’t truly damage the other one through the Force connection, but they can still scare the crap out of each other.

But he doesn’t turn it on her. He simply palms the switch and the blade comes out, with the two crossbars. _You see these?_

“Yeah. They’re pretentious.”

He snorts. _They’re heat vents. The kyber crystal inside is cracked. It generates too much heat, so the crossguards vent it._

“Oh.” She scowls. “I thought you put those on to make it look cool.”

He gives her a look.

“What?”

_I put those on to keep it from overheating and exploding._

He pauses a moment, then adds, deadpan, _Also, it looks cool._

Rey does not want to laugh at what is clearly a joke, so she sinks her teeth into her lower lip and grunts.

_I,_ he says, picking up the thread again, _am like a cracked kyber crystal. I require venting to keep from exploding._

He sounds so damn calm about it, like he isn’t talking about being dangerously out of control, like his fits of screaming rage are _healthy._ Like he’s broken and that’s just the way it is. It infuriates her.

“Can’t you just meditate or go for a walk or something, like a normal person?”

He laughs soundlessly. _It’s so easy for you_ , he says. _You think everyone’s like you on the inside?_

“Bullshit. You just don’t _want_ to get better.”

_Ah…_ The connection is beginning to fade out, and Rey’s glad to see it go. The last thing she sees is Kylo Ren’s face, lit by the red glow of the cracked lightsaber, and his odd, secret smile.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now let's get some plot up in this sucker...

The farmworld has a long, strange orbit, which gives it six seasons instead of the usual four. (This strikes Rey as truly bizarre, since Jakku’s seasons were “sand” and “sandier.”) She’s arrived in near-winter, which the computer says is something like autumn, which doesn’t help her at all.

It’s cold out, anyway. Not Starkiller cold, no snow on the ground, but her breath fogs out in front of her and the ground crunches with frost. It’s dark, too. She isn’t dressed for it, but hopefully she won’t be here for long.

Admiral Anhar knows she’s coming. He’s agreed to meet her on the edge of one of the settlements. She has no idea what to expect. She was half-thinking he’d refuse to even acknowledge the _Falcon’s_ message, but he set up the meeting anyway.

Rey doesn’t want to go in yelling “Why didn’t you come save us?!” She keeps telling herself that’s the wrong thing to say, that nobody will respond well to accusations like that.

It doesn’t help. The words are stuck in her throat in a lump, like unshed tears.

The settlement is very quiet. She can see lights in some of the buildings, but no one’s out and about.

She gets to the meeting place before he does and checks it for enemies.

There’s nothing. She even opens herself up to the Force just a little, and all she gets is a herd of shaggy draft animals, crowded together and half-asleep in the next field over.

The meeting itself is taking place in a sort of stable. Quiet, out of the way, empty. She sits down on a bale of dried grass and waits.

Admiral Anhar arrives and isn’t at all what she expected.

Rey was thinking of someone like Leia or Ackbar, somebody strong and commanding, projecting an air of competence.

The man who arrives is old, older than Skywalker was, his leathery face pleated with age. His shoulders are bowed with the weight of exhaustion.

“…Anhar?” she says, and hears her voice crack with confusion. She tries again. “Admiral Anhar?”

“I was,” he says tiredly. “And you’re the Jedi child that Organa found somewhere.”

“My name is—“

“Not important.” He holds up a hand. “What I don’t know, they can’t make me give up.”

Rey blinks at him. “Is that likely? Is someone going to torture you?”

Thinking _Now it all makes sense. If the First Order’s here, he could be in danger, of course he couldn’t come—_

Anhar shatters this in one word. “No.”

They stare at each other in the dimness, their breath making clouds of frost between them.

The old man shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. He’s dressed for this weather, even though she isn’t. “They used to,” he says finally. “In the old days. Empire liked torture droids. I took one in the teeth a time or two. But they’re not here now.”

“The First Order’s just as bad,” says Rey.

He shrugs. “They need us to keep exporting food,” he says. “They don’t blow us up as long as we do that. Even evil’s gotta eat.”

He doesn’t say anything else. The silence stretched out, gets long and cold and full of freezing breath. Rey feels the lump in her throat expanding until she can’t choke it down any longer.

“ _Why didn’t you help?”_ she cries. “We know you received the distress signal! Why didn’t you come to the General’s aid?”

Rey can hear her own voice, high and unsteady, like a child wailing over her betrayal, and she hates it. But she has to say it nevertheless.

The old man looks at her. Just looks.

“In the days of the Clone Wars, I came to Organa’s father’s rescue,” he says. “Her _real_ father, on Alderaan—I don’t care if Vader sired her, that man raised her. And in the days of the Rebellion, I came to her rescue. I sacrificed my own people, over and over, because I believed. Because _they_ believed. We were going to make a better galaxy. All we had to do was defeat the Empire. And now it’s the First Order, and the Resistance.”

“Yes!” Rey says eagerly. “It’s the Resistance and we still need your help!”

“Don’t you understand?” he asks wearily, rubbing his hand over his seamed face. “Don’t you see? _Nothing has changed.”_

Rey stares blankly at him.

“I sacrificed the best of my generation in the Clone Wars,” the old admiral says tiredly. “And then my daughter’s generation. I sent them to their deaths, because I thought it would make a difference. But here we are, and now it’s my granddaughter’s generation. And the same forces are trying to rule us and the same forces are holding out—the same _people,_ even—and we didn’t accomplish anything. The First Order is the Empire in different clothes. The Resistance is the Rebellion. And I’ve sent hundreds of gallant children to die, and for what? To end up in exactly the same place as we started.”

Rey doesn’t know what to say. His despair is like a palpable thing in the room, like a gray blanket weighing everything down.

“But…but you have to have hope,” she says finally. “General Organa says hope is the most important thing. We have to be the spark…”

Her words feel flat and stupid when she says them to the old man with his weary eyes.

_The General would be able to say it. The General would make him believe it._

She isn’t the General.

“You _have_ to believe me,” she says, trying to pour her earnestness into her words, trying to make him see. “It matters. Hope matters. It…it all counts.”

She reaches out her hand. If she can just make him _see,_ surely…

He pulls back, suddenly narrowing his eyes, and then gives a short, painful laugh. “You don’t even know you’re doing it, do you?”

“Doing what?”

“Trying to…” He waves his hand, as if it’s an answer. “I’m old enough to remember the Jedi. The way they had. It won’t work on me, child. I’m sure you’re loyal to the General. I’m glad she’s got loyal people. But I am _done._ I am old and I want to die in my own fields, with earth on my hands, not in the cold of space accomplishing _nothing.”_

Anhar turns away. He leaves the room, but the despair stays behind, heavy as lead against her heart. She hears the door shut, the crackle of his footsteps on frosty ground, and still the room is full of sorrow.

It is long minutes before Rey leaves the room. She walks blindly through the settlement, not seeing it, not sure where she is going.

She believes the old admiral. She doesn’t want to, but every word he said was true.

_True._

_But wrong._

_But true._

_But…_

She reaches out to the Force for comfort but her misery is tainting it, turning the brilliant strands into drab woolen threads. It feeds back on her, sorrow calling to sorrow, and she begins to feel the grief of this planet _…the saplings killed by frost…the draft animals dropping stillborn calves, nudging them to get up, to move…the bodies buried beneath stones, their dreams lost…the little rodent-thing in the grass, caught in the predator’s snare, trying to move…_

“No…” whispers Rey. “No, please…”

It is too much. It is overwhelming her and she does not know how to block it out.

_…the dead are cold beneath the ground and the ones who loved them have holes in their heart and trees break under the weight of the ice and the animals die in the field with their lungs full of frost and the roots freeze underground..._

Her steps slow until she is standing in the middle of a fallow field.

She sinks to her knees and then further down, her forehead against the cold earth, pressed down by the weight of sorrow, and she cannot claw her way free.

She doesn’t know how long she lies huddled against the ground before Kylo Ren senses her.

 

* * *

 

 

Kylo Ren wakes up cold.

He is shivering, even under the blankets, even in the strict temperature-controlled air of the ship. He feels a strange nausea when he sits up and his first thought is that he’s been poisoned.

_Great. Hux couldn’t get me with a blaster and decided to poison me._

He is honestly rather surprised. Hux doesn’t like Kylo Ren, but he likes that Kylo Ren _exists_. Hux wants a leash so he can snap and growl on the end of it. Without the leash, he’s lost.

Possibly it’s someone other than Hux, one of the underlings…not Phasma, of course. Phasma comes at you from the front and says “I’m going to stab you in the face,” and then proceeds to stab you in the face. Kylo quite likes Phasma.

He turns to the Force, peering at the tides inside his own body, looking for something that might indicate what’s going on…and instead of poison, he finds the Force bond with Rey.

_It’s not me._

_Something’s wrong with her._

He reaches out down the connection, his heart in his throat. Is she dead? Injured?

No.

Something else has happened to his little scavenger. The light inside her is flickering, the crystal brightness swathed in a web of gray. The Force is still strong in her, absurdly strong, but it is no longer a brilliant glow. She has sunk somehow into the earth around her and pulled grief out of it and now all that light has gone quenched and gray.

_Are you there?_

_Can you hear me?_

_Answer me!_

She makes a vague noise of assent. She is sunk too deep in despair to feel anything. Not surprise, not anger, nothing but the poison gray. It makes him think of a fungus, a thousand filaments winding around her.

Even her acknowledgement isn’t motivated by any emotion except a desire for him to stop bothering her and let her alone.

_What the hell are you doing?_

He can’t even get thoughts out of her now, just fragmented images—an old man with broken eyes, dead draft animals, trees breaking under the weight of frost— _what in Space is going on?_

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers. Her forehead is actually against the cold dirt. Her body is starting to shiver because it, at least, knows something bad is happening. “He gave us everything and nothing changed. Nothing… _ever_ …changes...”

She’s starting to scare him now.

He clamps down on the fear and slides deeper into her mind, and oh, it’s so easy to do, there’s no resistance at all, nothing stopping him. That’s wrong, too. She should be fighting him, screaming at him, throwing every sin he’s ever committed back into his face. He’d prefer that.

Kylo Ren gets far enough inside her that he can feel her heartbeat as well as his own, feel her lungs working like a strange, too-swift echo of his.

And then he sees what’s happening, and he wants to tear his hair out and scream.

If Luke Skywalker was alive, he would walk up to the old man and choke the life out of him, never mind the Force, never mind lightsabers, he’d even take off his gloves so he could use his bare hands to do it.

How could his uncle have failed so badly?

Kylo _knew_ Rey hadn’t had any mental shields except her own stubbornness. He’d tried to interrogate her once and he hadn’t lied to her, he could have taken anything he wanted. He hadn’t given it much thought because lots of people with a touch of Force Sensitivity wandered around like that, and they mostly managed.

But Skywalker had taught her to see the Force. To _connect_ to it, like the Sith and the Jedi did. And she had. She could tap into it… _and she still didn’t have any shields._

Her mind had been wide open to him, but then, it always was. It had never occurred to him that Skywalker hadn't taught her that most basic of lessons and that she was still wide open to _everything._

Had a Stormtrooper walked into his cabin right then, they would have heard the Supreme Leader muttering the word “fuck!” under his breath, over and over, less like a curse and more like a prayer.

She was completely unguarded to the Force. On Ach-To, a place in perfect balance, that didn’t matter. In a small ship wandering through the emptiness of space, it didn’t matter much. But on a planet full of living things, where the Force was strong and rich and layered…

How the hell could Skywalker teach her to tap into the Force and not show her how to _stop_ doing it?

Kylo Ren doesn’t even set foot on a planet without being swathed in mental shields. It’s second nature. Otherwise any emotion you felt would go out into the energy of the planet and come rushing back to you, multiplied a thousand times. Anger attracted anger. Hate attracted hate.

Rey had felt despair and then she’d tapped into the Force and the planet, blind and obedient, had _given_ her its despair because it thought that was what she wanted.

Now she was drowning in it.

Underneath his fear is a great deal of exasperation. He could have handled this so much better! Kylo Ren knows despair like a fish knows water. But Rey…

Rey lives on hope. Rey believes in hope the way that Phasma believes in blasters and Hux believes in neatly-pressed uniforms.

The sudden lack of it is suffocating her.

In the time it takes for Kylo to sort this out, she has sunk deeper into the gray haze. Her heartbeat is slowing down, wondering why it’s bothering to beat at all. Her lungs are dragging in slow, shallow breaths. She’ll put herself into a coma before too long, and be trapped inside her head with nothing but dead animals and frozen trees.

_Shit._

He’d go to her right now if he could, leap in his shuttle and fly there, but he has no idea where she is and she’s not going to tell him. And even if he coaxed it out of her, he’s probably eighteen hours away at minimum, and in eighteen hours, she won’t just be dead, she’ll be so dead that Snoke will look positively lively by comparison.

She’ll also leave a sinkhole in the Force there, a place of the Dark strong enough to kill plants and lead foolish young Jedi astray. Kylo Ren doesn’t much care about that, but he suspects that Rey would if she knew.

Whatever he does next, he has to do it from here, and he has to do it soon.

Well, he’s inside her right now, wearing her nerves like a second skin. You’d think that sort of intimacy would be sexy, but frankly it’s just hella uncomfortable. Kylo Ren enjoys being inside women, but only about six inches worth. Not like _this._

_It’s fine. It’ll be fine._

_As long as I don’t have to figure out how to use the bathroom, it’ll be fine._

First things first, he’s got to block her off from the planet. The poor dumb planet is killing her because it doesn’t know any better.

Problem is that if he put his own shields up around them both, there’s a chance he’ll block out not only the planet but the connection. She’ll be lost in the cold gray depths without him and it’ll take precious minutes to find her again.

Rey’s heartbeat stutters and misses a beat. When it starts again, it’s definite weaker.

_Shit._

He takes a breath, throws the dice, and slams his mental shields up around them both.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I enjoy this way too much. I should probably be getting some real work done, but eh.

It works.

The shields are up. They’re in here together.

Kylo Ren realizes he’s holding his breath, and that’s a bad idea. His own body can handle it, of course, but Rey’s is having a hard enough time breathing already. He gasps in air and then shoves her lungs a few times for good measure. It’d be pretty damn ironic if he’d pulled off some kind of Force miracle and then suffocated her while he was being self-congratulatory.

Of course, Rey’s still sunk under her own despair and she’s got a connection to the Force even now that’s still trying to feed into the planet. It’s actively shredding his shields and he’s having to spend power recklessly to keep them up, so this isn’t ideal, but it’s better than it was.

Next step, stop the planet.

_It’s a good thing I’m an egotistical bastard,_ he thinks _, or that would seem like a tall order._

He tries to sense the planet and of _course_ it's a damn farmworld. It's as tame as a world gets and it does what people ask it to. Now it's trying to do what the half-trained Jedi asked it to and the gray fog is getting deeper and more poisonous as it reaches into its bones and tries to dredge up greater and greater sorrows for her to drink.

On the bright side, at least it’s a very small planet. Basically just a moon with good soil. And it’s not a tomb world or something bombarded into slag. Something that has reason to be angry.

Kylo, uh, might have left a few of those in his wake before.

At least the farmworld will listen to him.

Probably.

If it doesn’t, he’ll come back here in a destroyer and pound it into dust.

He takes another deep breath and shouts:

_“ENOUGH!”_

There’s beeping in the back of his head as the computer in his quarters (newly repaired, still with bits of packing material clinging to the corners) tries to figure out what’s wrong and then it says, somewhat worriedly, “Do you have a medical emergency?”

“Not here,” he tells it, and Rey’s mouth moves, saying _Not here_ in unison with his, because apparently her body’s decided that he’s a better bet to run things right now. _Lovely._

But none of this is really important. What matters is the planet, which is…which, thank space, is listening to him.

He cracks a shield open, the thinnest amount, and reaches out to it.

It has stopped swathing everything in despair. It seems confused and a little hurt, a vast, powerful beast that was nevertheless only trying to obey. It was doing what the Jedi asked. Why is it being yelled at?

Oh, gods and ghosts, now he has to talk a goddamn planet down. He should have eaten a much bigger breakfast.

His first instinct is to snarl at it. He squelches that immediately, because if the planet decides not to cooperate, he’s going to be left trying to kill a whole world with his mind.

Theoretically this is possible, but dreadnaughts are much better at it and they don’t get migraines afterward.

What would Vader do?

_Vader would…get a star destroyer. Or a death star. Okay, not particularly useful._

What would his mother do?

_She’d make a rousing speech about hope and the planet would do anything she wanted._

Okay, what would _Snoke_ do?

_Snoke would tell the planet what it wanted to hear._

Good enough.

It's a tame world. It wants to please the people on it. That should be easy, right?

_It’s all right,_ he tells the farmworld, dragging up every shred of patience he has. _It’s not your fault._

And then, even though it damn near kills him, he’s the heir of darkness, he’s Vader’s grandson, and now he’s talking to a whole world like it’s a dim toddler: _You did good. Thank you. Please stop now._

He imagines the draft animals standing in the field, imagines scratching one behind the—shit, they don’t have ears. Under the chin, then. _Good planet._

When he gets back to his own body, he’s going to carve so many holes in the flagship that they’ll invent a new code for it. Niner-Red-Omega, maybe.

But it works.

The farmworld quiets. The terrible poison fog dissipates slowly from around them. Rey is still facedown in the dirt, but at least it’s not getting _worse._

With the planet no longer trying to helpfully drown them, he has a minute to stop and take stock.

Okay. Her inner light is quenched and gray and wrapped in misery and she’s not fighting it at all. And her body’s temperature is dropping and oh, joy, looks like her kidneys are shutting down, that’s just _great_ , that’s the perfect addition to an already stellar day.

_Fight it!_ he yells in her head. _Fight it!_

She doesn’t respond. He doesn’t know if she can even hear him.

_Why aren’t you fighting this?_

He’d shake her, but he doubts she’d even notice.

When you’re incredibly powerful, you can make incredibly powerful mistakes. Kylo had teachers around to yank him out of his. Rey has…well, apparently Rey has him.

_Lucky her._

_Fine. We’ll do this the hard way._

_Mind or body first?_

_Body._ If it dies, it doesn’t matter how emotionally healthy his little scavenger’s mind is, she’s still going to die…or worse yet, she’ll wind up stuck in his body with him, and that’s an emotional intimacy Kylo Ren is definitely not ready for.

_“Rule the galaxy with me,” I said. And didn’t think to specify “but stay in your own damn body while you do it.”_

Rey’s body is shivering violently and its heartbeat seems to have synced up with his. This is not ideal, since he’s got a lot more mass than she does and that means her heart’s beating too slow, but at least it’s still beating. _Keep doing that,_ he tells it, in much the same tone that he used on the planet.

(When this is all over, he’s not just going to chop up the flagship, he’s going to go to totally different ships and take a lightsaber to them, too. He’s going to find a planet that no one is using and carve the word FUCK in it in letters eight hundred feet high. With his _teeth_.)

Breathing? Fine, might as well hook it to his, too. Lungs want to breathe. He holds out his own body’s rhythm like a gift and hers latches onto it immediately. Too slow and too deep, but it’s still air and air is important.

Kylo Ren has never had cause to be grateful to his own autonomic nervous system before. He makes a mental note to do something extra-nice for it.

He decides not to mess with the kidneys. That’s high-level, complicated stuff, and the medbay computers are better suited to it than he is. In the old days, there were Jedi who had the power to heal—and even Sith, although they tended to do nasty things with it—but Kylo Ren is not one of those people. He breaks people. Putting them back together again is a different skillset.

Now for the cold.

_Finally, something easy!_

Raising the temperature around Rey’s body is dead simple. Energy converts to heat. He funnels energy into the space around them, lets the atoms get excited, warms the surrounding air up until it’s positively balmy inside the shields. The hard part is keeping from giving it too much energy. The mood he’s in right now, he could flash-fry the air and wouldn’t that be awkward?

 He steps back mentally, takes stock again. Rey’s body is breathing, heart’s beating, she’s stopped shivering. The planet’s doing whatever planets do in their own time, thinking about plate tectonics or tides or something.

He has to rest for a moment. He’s pulled off too many miracles in the last twenty minutes and he’s exhausted. He is going to have a headache that could drop rancors.

“I’m not sure you’re worth this,” he tells Rey. “I am having serious doubts.”

She doesn’t say anything. He prods her with his mind to make sure she’s actually still in there.

_—dead trees dead animals dead pilots dead—_

Yep. Still in there.

He rubs his hand over his face. Rey’s body twitches in an involuntary echo.

Now. How the hell does he coax her back out of the gray fog?

What would Vader—no, Vader’d kill her. No help there.

Snoke would make a note of Rey’s weakness, her vulnerability to despair, and he’d make a collar out of that weakness and snap it over her neck. This is an appealing prospect, but Kylo doesn’t know how to get her back from the despair long enough to collar her in the first place.

Leia…well. Leia would pull her back with the force of her love and her determination, convince her that hope has a place in the galaxy, that she has to believe. Unfortunately that sort of thing only works if you are absolutely sincere, and Kylo Ren can’t lecture anybody about hope with a straight face.

The less said about love, the better.

It’s not that he isn’t capable of it, of course. Kylo Ren is abundantly capable of love. He’s also self-aware enough to know that his version of love would send a sane woman screaming for the hills.

This doesn’t bother him. Emotionally healthy people don’t rule galaxies.

And just like that, the answer clicks into place.

He has nothing to offer Rey but darkness and rage, so that’s what he’ll give her.

Kylo Ren knows despair, knows it intimately, and the only way he’s ever learned to keep it at bay is with fury.

He turns his attention inward, looking for rage.

He doesn’t have to look for very long.

The black tide’s always inside him, always raging. Most of the time he’s trying to tamp it down, keep it from overrunning everything, but not today.

_Perhaps this will be a good day after all._

He courts the beast now, stokes it higher, feeds it with every betrayal he’s ever felt, every slight, every petty anger. He feeds it until it’s a savage, roiling blackness, until it feels like his skin is stretched over darkness, until there’s nothing left in him but pure blind fury--

\--and pours it straight down his scavenger girl’s throat.


	7. Chapter 7

For a long, long moment nothing seems to happen. Long enough that Kylo Ren starts to think he’s finally found a situation where rage isn’t enough.

Then the web of gray lines around her begin to turn red. Not blood red but lava red, magma red. It looks as if she’s encased in molten wires.

Kylo’s never seen anything quite like that before.

The connection is tight enough now that he can feel anger flowering inside her like the first seconds of an explosion. It burns through, fever hot, and sears away the sorrow.

_Is it working?_

The fungal threads of despair begin to char and fall away.

_I think It’s working!_

He’d gloat but he’s too astonished. In his heart of hearts, he didn’t think he’d pull it off.

Besides, he’ll have time to gloat after he’s sure that she’s still alive in there and hasn’t burned out something important. He should probably check and see if she’s still sane, but honestly, it’s a lesser concern. People are far too attached to the idea of sanity, in Kylo Ren’s opinion.

(This point of view was shared historically by both Sith and Jedi. Jedi figure as long as you’re not hurting anyone, it’s nobody’s business, and Sith figure that if you can remake the world, you get to define sanity as anywhere you’re standing and more power to you.)

The molten wires begin to darken. It’s fascinating to watch. He leans in mentally, watching the threads of the Force turn black. Not a polished onyx but a burnt blackness, threads of soot stretching through Rey like capillaries.

He wonders vaguely if any of the Knights of Ren would know anything about this. They’re all off running other ships, making sure star systems are choked off, and he hasn’t seen one in the flesh for months, but they’re still the closest things he has to friends, a state he defines as “will probably make an effort to recruit me before trying to kill me.” A couple of them are much stronger on theory than he is—Ban Kalla might know, he’s got all kinds of things locked away in that Twi’lek brain of his.

_And I can’t send a subspace message asking, because Hux reads my mail and will have a lot of questions. And none of our codes are up to_ this.

His train of thought is interrupted because Rey wakes up all at once.

She comes up screaming and striking out, but he expected that.

He just didn’t expect her to hit quite so _hard._

_Ow,_ he says, from the mental floor.

“ _What did you do to me?”_ she screams at him, kicking savagely at what would be his body, if he was actually there and not a few dozen parsecs away. “What have you _done_ , you bastard?”

_Saved your life. You’re welcome._

She crouches in the middle of the field, her chest heaving. She looks wild-eyed, a previously tame animal gone feral and furious.

_You might want to spend some quality time with a medical computer,_ he adds.

She screams at him. He thinks there’s some obscenities from Jakku in there, but mostly it’s just wordless wrath.

It occurs to Kylo Ren that he might possibly have overdone it.

She aims another mental kick at him.

Well, he’d given her his rage. What did he think she was going to feel afterward—sweetness and light?

_Breathe,_ he suggests, and then remembers that he’s still got her lungs tethered to his, so he breathes for both of them. Calmly. Meditatively.

It’s ironic, but Master Luke would have been impressed. He’d always been on Kylo’s case about taking calm breaths and centering himself instead of lashing out, and here they are.

Rey breathes with him. She doesn’t have much choice. He feels her heart trying to race and tells it sternly that it is not allowed to do so.

After a few minutes, he can feel the black tide receding. Her natural tendency toward the light side is trying to re-exert itself, the burnt threads beginning to lighten a little.

“Six inches worth?!” she snarls at him.

It takes him a minute to realize what thought of his she’d managed to pick out from the poison gray fog.

Of _course_ it would be that one.

Well, he’d had an amazing run of luck in the last few minutes, it had to end at some point.

_Six and some change?_ he says.

Rey is staring across space with a murderous expression.

  _…quite a lot of change?_

She narrows her eyes.

_I mean, you round up and people assume you’re bragging…Do you want decimal places?_

“What. Are. You. Doing?” she says, biting off each word.

_Trying to distract you,_ he says, because there’s not much point in lying.

It’s worked, at least a little. She’s still mad, but it’s less focused because she’s mad at him about too many different things.

At least she’s not kicking him any more.

“What did you do to me?” she says, a little more calmly this time.

_I told you, I saved your life._ _Now, if I give you back your lungs, are you going to stay calm?_

“Not if you’re going to be condescending,” she growls at him.

He laughs. _Good enough._

When he releases her body back to her, he feels an odd wrenching, as if he’s lost something. Without the echo of her heartbeat, his own feels flat.

He lets the heat fade as well. Now that she’s pushing him out of her mind, it’s harder to keep channeling energy so far distant. He keeps the shields up, though, because damned if he’s going to do this twice.

Rey stands in the field, her arms wrapped around herself, stamping her feet.

“What happened?” she says finally.

He tells her.

“That can happen? Why didn’t Master Luke warn me?”

Kylo Ren closes his eyes and contemplates blowing Ach-To into smithereens, just on principle.

_I don’t know_ , he says. _You may recall that the last few times he and I met, we were trying to murder each other. The subject didn’t come up. But I suggest you learn how to put up shields, or…_

He sends her an image of herself a few minutes earlier, everything about her gone gray and poisoned. _If not for yourself, for the rest of the galaxy. The local wildlife are going to avoid this field like it was sown with salt. If I hadn’t showed up, you could have taken the whole planet out with you._

She scuffs at the dirt with her foot.

He waits.

“I don’t know how to do that,” she finally admits. “Is it in the books…?”

Space, he’s tired. He can’t handle this right now.

_Go back to the Falcon,_ he says wearily. _You’re safe in space, more or less. It’s not responsive like a planet is. Just don’t do anything stupid._

“I can’t live in space!” She’s still spitting mad.

Ironically, Kylo Ren himself feels calmer than he has since…hell, since before he met Snoke. It won’t last, but he seems to have dammed the black tide for a little while, or at least diverted the bulk of it over to Rey.

_If you go back to the ship,_ he says, with marvelous patience, _then you will be safe enough until tomorrow or the next day. And when I have slept off the headache that I am about to get from keeping you alive, I will show you how to put up a shield._

She mutters something and stomps toward the _Falcon._

He waits until she’s actually on board, until the ship takes off, before he finally lets his shields around her drop.

And then, finally, he can be done.

Kylo Ren collapses back onto his bed, feeling as if he’s run from one end of the galaxy to the other on foot. The light in his quarters seems blazingly bright and he slaps at the switch on the wall to dial it back before he goes completely blind. He can feel his pulse pounding in his temples and pretty soon it’s going to feel like somebody’s jamming a lightsaber into his left eye.

The connection with Rey is dissipating rapidly. That’s fine. He has had quite enough of her for one evening.

But as the bond fades, he looks over one last time and sees the brilliant white crystal of her soul, no longer gray.

The white crystal that now has a single, jagged crack in the base, the color of char, and creeping, dove gray inclusions along its length.

_Well,_ Kylo Ren thinks. _Well, well. Isn’t_ that _interesting…_ and then the headache claims him.


	8. Chapter 8

Kylo Ren spends three days recovering from his headache.

Possibly it would have gone faster, but on the second day he has to pitch Hux into a wall because Hux is being belligerent. He stands over the general, trying to pretend that his skull isn’t splitting, and pins him down to the deckplates. “I am trying to track down the little scavenger rat that killed Supreme Leader Snoke. Why. Are. You. Interrupting. Me.”

And Hux mumbles something and crawls out, once Kylo lets him get up again.

The whole episode is unpleasant. Kylo can’t shake the feeling he’s participating in somebody else’s fetish. Also, his head is throbbing again. His sinus cavities feel like they’ve been packed full of dwarf-star matter, something dense and hot and unpleasant.

The medical droids can only do so much for what is, after all, a purely psychic problem. He goes back to bed.

On the third day, fortified with strong caf and a couple of vitamin shots, he checks in on his little scavenger.

Her first words are _“What_ have you _done_ to me?”

_…Good morning,_ he says.

 “Is this some kind of Dark Side trick?!”

_Is what?_

He hears the hiss of her breath through her teeth. “This isn’t funny!”

_Am I laughing?_

She stares intently through space, then finally says “…no.”

_So tell me what the problem is and I’ll tell you if it’s a Dark Side trick._

“I’m angry!”

He taps his finger on the rim of the caf mug. _All right?_

“You did something—broke something—you don’t _understand!”_ And then, somewhat unexpectedly, she throws something through his head.

It’s a Jedi text. It hits the wall and slides down with a leathery thump. Kylo’s rather pleased that he doesn’t flinch at all this time.

_So you’re angry,_ he says.

“Yes!”

_You’re always angry with me, though. Monster, remember?_

_“Not like this!”_ Rey snarls, and he feels her take hold of the connection between them.

The black tide roars over the bond. Kylo Ren recognizes it immediately, the old familiar taste of iron in his mouth, and almost laughs.

_Oh, that._

“Why did you do this to me?!”

_To save your life. We went over this._

“I can’t stop being angry! It’s all right there! I want to fight everything! Everyone!”

_Yeah, it’ll do that._

“What am I supposed to do now?”

He takes another sip of caf. _Have you considered chopping up a bulkhead? I find that very therapeutic._

“Take it back!” she demands. “It’s like having some kind of monster inside me!”

_You’re playing Jedi,_ he says pleasantly. _Aren’t you supposed to know how to deal with anger?_

Rey goes berserk.

She uses the staff, not the lightsaber, which is probably for the best. The staff can’t do much to hardened deck plates. She murders a supply crate and an unfortunate piece of ductwork, though, and doesn’t stop until she’s dripping with sweat and her breath in coming in hard pants.

Kylo Ren waits out the storm.

Eventually she sags with exhaustion, holding herself up with the staff as a crutch. He wants to reach out and brush the hair out of her eyes, but he doesn’t.

_Better?_

He doesn’t really need to ask. He can see the tide has receded. She slumps down on a crate and puts her head in her hands.

“I hate you,” she mutters.

The Jedi would frown on that, too, but it doesn’t seem like a good time to bring that up.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Better,” she finally admits.

_And that’s why I chop up bulkheads._

“I can’t live with this darkness inside me.” It sounds like a plea.

He takes pity on her. _I doubt you’ll have to. Think of it like a blood transfusion. You lost a lot of energy to the planet. I gave you some of mine. It won’t last forever. Eventually yours will replace it and you’ll go back to normal._

He doesn’t mention that fascinating crack in her soul. That has the look of something permanent. Something possibly…exploitable.

She exhales.

“Why did you save me?”

_What?_

“Why did you save my life? You could have just let me die.”

He doesn’t know what to say. Because there was a moment, when they were fighting back to back, when he felt like he was whole? Because the thought of losing her terrified him, and that pissed him off? Because she’s his and he wasn’t going to give her up to anyone, not even death, even if it meant going half-blind with the pain of saving her?

Instead he gives her an answer she’ll accept from him. _So you’d owe me a favor,_ he says.

"In your dreams!"

_It was worth a try._ He finishes off the caf. It's gone cold at the bottom.

“Thank you,” she says, grudgingly.

_Oh. Uh. Sure._

He clears his throat. _Now, I promised to teach you to shield, because I am not doing that again._

She sits down cross-legged and waits.

* * *

 

Ultimately, shields are easy. They’re just like shields on a star destroyer, a little bubble of energy that surrounds the wielder. The only trick is actually practicing it, over and over, like strengthening a muscle.

Rey has more raw power than anyone needs, but the mental conduit that feeds the Force to the shields doesn’t exist yet. Kylo Ren sits down in his quarters, mentally ‘opposite’ her, and shows her the conduit to his.

It occurs to him in passing that she could do him an astonishing amount of damage right now if she wanted to. She’s inside his shields and he’s literally showing her how they work. He isn’t that worried about it.

Frankly, he’d be really damn impressed if she stabbed him in the back.

Well, they’ll work up to that.

He walks her through the entire process, step by step. Puts up shields around them, takes them down again. Rey frowns with concentration.

_Now you try._

She closes her eyes, palms on her knees, and tries to do it for herself.

She’s a quick study. She gets the shield up on the second or third try, although it’s cobweb thin. Kylo feels a brief surge of pride.

“Is that…did I…?”

_You did. Well done._

She beams at him with uncomplicated pleasure for an instant, then suddenly remembers who he is, and the shutters fall down over her face again. “So that’s all there is to it?”

He snorts.

_Not hardly. Now you need to make a shield that’s worth having._

“What?”

He reaches out a mental hand and shreds her cobweb-fine shield.

_“Hey!”_

_Now build it again. Stronger._

Rey’s eyebrows draw down, but she does it again. This time it’s about as strong as tissue paper.

He can tell she’s really trying. He fights back a sigh, knocks the shield down, and gives her a mental shove.

It knocks her back on one elbow. Loose hair falls into her eyes again. “What was _that!?”_

_I’m being nice._

“You hit me!”

_No, I nudged you. With shields that weak, if I hit you, you’d go through the wall. Build it again._

She’s pissed off now. The next effort is almost up to the thickness of gauze.

This time, after he tears through it, he reaches out and pushes the hair out of her eyes. It’s been driving him crazy. He tucks the stray strands behind one ear, the tips of his gloves brushing across the soft skin under her jaw.

Her eyes snap open, anger and confusion warring on her face. It occurs to Kylo Ren yet again that no one ever taught her to hide her emotions or mocked her mercilessly for feeling…anything.

_Build it again_ , he says, taking refuge in the lesson.

_Again._

_Again._

_Again._


	9. Chapter 9

Rey is tired and frustrated, but in a perverse way, she welcomes the exhaustion.

If she is exhausted, she isn’t going out of her mind with rage. If she’s exhausted, she won’t hurt anybody.

She knows that this is the exact opposite of how things should be. If she was in control, it would be the other way around.

But she isn’t in control. There’s a great snarling monster crouched inside her chest, and her only hope is to wear it out.

Kylo Ren has one too. She’s felt it. She’s seen it. But his is on a leash.

She wishes to all the gods of all the planets in the galaxy that she could leash hers so easily.

Rey has never been angry like this. Rey believes in light and goodness and justice and redemption. The beast inside her believes in none of these things. It exists only to destroy, to carry itself onto the battlefield and kill and kill and die with its teeth in the last enemy’s throat.

She has never felt anything like it, and she does not know how to deal with it now that it has been thrust upon her.

_It won’t last forever. It will go away._

She clings to this hope, because it’s all she has.

She is furious at Kylo Ren for doing this to her. She knows that he saved her life, she even understands that it was the only way that he knew how to do it, to slip the beast off its leash and let it carry her out of the poison gray despair.

She knows she should be grateful and this makes her even more furious because she does not want to be grateful to her enemy for anything.

She particularly does not want to remember the sensation of his fingers against her skin, brushing hair out of her eyes, the way they trailed down her jawline, leaving heat behind them.

As if the thought has summoned him, he appears in her head. The roiling darkness that she is used to has settled somewhat, or perhaps she’s gotten close enough to understand him better. Now he’s a pillar of black iron in her head, the material scorched and pitted, with the rage-beast shackled at its foot.

_Ready?_ he asks.

Rey nods. She doesn’t want to talk. She just wants to get these shields up and then go back to exhausting herself with staffwork.

She resents, on top of everything else, that he’s not a bad teacher. Evil people aren’t supposed to be good at that. But apparently it’s a skill like any other, and somewhere along the way, he learned how.

_At the training temple,_ he says, picking up her thoughts with annoying ease. _I was the first student, so I helped to teach others the things I had mastered._

“Before you butchered them!” she snarls.

He slaps her shields down so hard that it makes her ears ring. She thinks for an instant that she’s made him angry, but he’s got a smirk on his face. _When you get angry, your shields waver._

“Then I’m doomed,” she mutters.

He actually laughs at that. _Or you could use the anger to fuel the shields._ Shows her his own, thick as blast doors. _Do you think I’m keeping these up with my faith in human kindness?_

She has a vague image of the dark beast running on a hamster wheel. That can’t be right, but she tries anyway, tells the rage inside her to go do something useful with itself.

The result is…not terribly successful. He shows her his view from outside, her shields like wet clay, lumpy and malformed as a child’s attempt at pottery.

She groans.

_It’s not that bad,_ he says. _They’re a lot thicker than they were, anyway. In places._ He pokes at a few spots, watches them crumble away.

“I’ll never be able to go down to a planet like this.” She’s already dreading the next stop, where she’s supposed to meet with two diplomats, convince them somehow to support the Resistance again, and how is she going to manage _that?_

_Then we will keep practicing. Build your shields again._

She sighs and obeys.

The fourth or fifth or tenth or twelfth time that he knocks them down, he reaches through and pushes the hair out of her eyes again. She freezes, waiting for him to be done, waiting for the touch to end, hoping that he can’t tell that it’s hitting her like a graze from a blaster.

Vain hope.

_Hmm…?_ His fingers slide over her jaw and even though he’s parsecs away, she can feel the touch as if it’s really happening. Her heart jumps and surely he can feel that in return, his gloved hand moving slowly down her throat, the pulse just under his thumb.

His fingertips rest against her collarbone and she feels his breath in her ear as he leans in and whispers _You’re supposed to be stopping me._

“Shit!” She slams her shields up.

If he laughed at her, she’d kill him. But he doesn’t. His eyes are dark and thoughtful. He doesn’t say a word, just batters on the shields until they fall.

Rey takes some small pleasure in the fact that it takes him a little more effort this time.

That lasts until the shields fall. He strokes the back of her neck this time and she tells herself that she’s just gathering her strength for a second or two, not that she’s enjoying it, certainly not that at all.

She doesn’t want to be enjoying it. This is Kylo Ren, for god’s sake. He doesn’t just have blood on his hands, he’s practically standing knee deep in it.

That thought gets the shields back up again.

She could swear that he takes his time bringing them down this time, almost as if this is part of the game. But soon enough she feels a hand moving lazily down her back and dear god, she must be as much of a monster as he is, there’s no other explanation.

She shouldn’t want this.

Rey makes the shields this time as if she’s trying to keep herself out as much as him and they go completely haywire, a ball of energy in the middle of the air that sputters out while she’s still trying to figure out what she did wrong.

He doesn’t comment, but she sees him raise an eyebrow at that.

_Again,_ he orders, cool and remote, as if he’s not stroking his fingers back up her spine, inch by inch, while her heart hammers inside her ribcage.

She goes back to the very first lesson, takes a deep breath, ignores the sensation of being touched—he isn’t here, he’s light-years away, no one is here, this is only an illusion—and builds the shields as high and strong as she can.

The touch winks out.

She has a moment then to breathe, to get her mental feet back under her. She watches her enemy testing the shields and this time, when he starts to unmake them, she pours energy back into them, building them back up.

He’s focusing on the air between them, where the shields are, and then he smiles abruptly. There’s no darkness in it, no lust, no hidden meaning. She recognizes it, even though she doesn’t want to—a teacher’s pride in a student who’s mastered the lesson well.

It breaks her where his touch did not. Not because she has any illusions that he can be redeemed or brought back to the light or that Ben Solo is still inside there, trying to get out. They’re past that. He is what he is now, and she can accept that or not and it won’t make a damn bit of difference.

No, it breaks her because she would have done anything for Skywalker to look at her with that expression, and he never did.

Perhaps he never looked at Kylo Ren that way, either.

Perhaps that was the Jedi’s great failing, in the end.

_You’re probably safe to go dirtside again,_ Kylo Ren tells her. If he knows what she’s thinking, he doesn’t give any sign. _This, at least, should keep you from getting sunk into the Force and taking a planet down with you._

She nods.

_Keep practicing, though._

A sudden strike, from two directions at once. She doesn’t know which to defend against, and the shield is forced open while she’s still shoring up the opposite side.

_Some enemies will be cleverer than a planet_ , he says. _But this will keep you safe for now._

_At least until I can get to you to help._

The connection between them fades out. She is left sitting on the cargohold floor, legs folded under her, and it’s only after he’s long gone that it occurs to her to wonder why he’d want to help her—or even touch her—at all.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really, I was holding out well until I ran across a thread about Reylo embodying all that is wrong with Western Civilization. 
> 
> Spite. Nothing makes the wordcount happen like spite.

Kylo Ren waits until the connection between them has closed completely, then falls back on the bed. If he was the sort of person who giggled, he’d be giggling uncontrollably, but he most definitely is not. You start giggling at the top and before you know it, you’re sitting in dark rooms stroking a white gizka and the troops are mutinying out of sheer aesthetic disgust.

So he doesn’t. But his grin is enormous.

He’s figured out what the Dark can give Rey.

He’d had an inkling when they had entered the elevator, going to see Snoke. He’d put his hand in the small of her back to guide her in. It should have been an impersonal gesture, captor to captive, but he’d felt her surprise over the link between them, and then the way that her concentration narrowed, just for a moment, to that place where they were touching.

The shielding lessons cemented it, though. He’d barely touched her, the faintest whisper through the Force bond, and her skin lit up like a lightsaber crystal.

His little scavenger is more than lonely. She’s desperate for the touch of skin against skin, not even sexually, _anything._ Comfort. Companionship. A simple touch to let her know she’s not the only creature in the galaxy.

A purely human need, but an important one.

He imagines long years alone in the desert, surrounded by aliens and other scavengers, watching her back at all times.

If she’d been something other than human—a Wookie or a Bith, say—she wouldn’t have noticed. If she’d been Twi’lek, she’d probably have gone mad from isolation. But she is human, so she buried that need and now it is roaring back to life.

He doubts she has any idea how easily he can read her now. She can keep him out of her mind as easily as ever, but her body’s another matter. You can’t hook someone’s heart and lungs up to yours and then sever the connection cleanly afterward.

Rey probably doesn’t know how easily she betrayed herself. When they touched, he was startled himself by the strong flush of physical desire and equally strong flush of alarm. It took him a minute to sort out what was going on. Women’s bodies are wired differently and it’s been awhile.

Still, when you get right down to it, it’s all blood flow and nerve endings and chemicals. Once he’d realized what was happening, it was obvious…and frankly, rather flattering.

_She_ clearly didn’t expect it, though, and equally clearly doesn’t know how to deal with it, and that’s an opening that he will take great pleasure in exploiting.

Speaking of which…

He’s hard as a rock right now, has been for awhile, and it’s starting to make his teeth ache.

He rolls off the bed and limps toward the ‘fresher, praying to the Force that Hux doesn’t decide right now would be the perfect time to go over duty rotations.

It doesn’t take long, but you don’t get points for style when it’s just you.

Afterward, he leans against the ‘fresher wall, thinking.

The situation looks a good bit trickier, now that the blood is no longer pooling somewhere other than his brain. What Rey needs isn’t just touch, it’s _comfort_.

Kindness. Gentleness. Tenderness.

If you made a list titled “Things Kylo Ren Is Bad At,” those would be near the top of the list.

He’s excellent at destroying things. If Rey had enemies, he could take them apart, one at a time, and drop them on her pillow like a cat with a dead bird.

Unfortunately, Rey only has one real enemy, and Kylo has only to look in the mirror to find him.

He is not good at being kind.

He wonders if he can track down a book that will help. _How To Pretend To Be A Decent Human Being. Sith's Guide to Faking Empathy. How To Meet Women And Not Traumatize Them.  
_

_Yeah, sure. That’ll work. Then she and I can bond over our shared love of throwing books at a wall._

He rubs a hand over his face. What he could really use is advice.

If life had gone differently, he’d call his mother about now, but he suspects she’s not very interested in hearing from him, particularly not for advice on how to seduce her pet Jedi. Anyway, she’s good with Senators and diplomats. She was terrible with his father. If there were ever two people who loved each other desperately and needed to _not_ be together, it was Leia Organa and Han Solo.

Besides, even at her best, she’d probably give motherly advice, like “Be yourself” and the one thing that would _not_ help was Kylo Ren being himself.

This is clearly not a _what would Vader do?_ situation.

Snoke would be good at this, of course, but even if he was alive, Kylo would balk at asking him for advice. He doesn’t like to think about Snoke and Rey in the same mental breath. When the old man had laid his spotted, gnarled fingers against Rey’s skin, Kylo had felt a blinding flash of rage. It was only by keeping his head down and all his emotions sunk deep in the black tide that he’d kept from giving himself away.

Sith tend not to leave Force ghosts, and damned if he’s going to go chasing a holocron to give him advice on talking to girls.

There’s three female Knights of Ren. One’s so cold that Phasma could take lessons from her and if she found a shred of tenderness in her heart, she’d carve it out with a lightsaber.

One has her own demons. Asking her for advice on seduction would be an act of shocking cruelty.

The final one is cheerful, good-natured, bakes for a hobby, and has, on multiple occasions, tortured spies to death while singing to them. Kylo Ren isn’t scared of her…much…but she does weird him out sometimes. Happy evil people are unsettling.

She’s also in command of a star destroyer, the crew of which are suicidally loyal to her, and she’s currently on the other side of the remains of the Republic, where she has been conducting a siege for some months.

She likes sieges. They let her catch up on her baking.

Her advice for seduction would probably involve chocolate-chip cookies and knives.

He rakes a hand through his hair.

Chocolate-chip cookies and knives is possibly still better than where he’s at now.

He thinks about it.

He thinks about it very hard.

He hasn’t done too badly yet, but he has to admit that fate’s helped quite a lot. If Skywalker hadn’t failed her so miserably…if she hadn’t made a near-fatal mistake on the planet…

Hell, if her hair hadn’t come out of the braid and fallen into her eyes…

Kylo Ren sighs. He knows his strengths. He’s also been taught, brutally, about his weaknesses.

His little scavenger’s heart is too important to leave to chance.

“Computer,” he says, sitting down at his desk, “send a private message to the commander of the destroyer _Steadfast…”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just like the idea of a Sith who bakes cookies.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, YOU stayed up two hours past your bedtime inventing a cookie-baking Sith.

The commander of the _Steadfast_ is named Sila Rakkar, but among the Knights of Ren, she was occasionally referred to, jokingly, as “Darth Mom.”

Mostly jokingly, anyway.

Sila is actually a few years younger than Kylo Ren, but is one of those individuals who gives the impression of having been born in their mid-fifties. She is round, plump, bright-eyed, and Kylo Ren once watched her cut a man into thirds with her lightsaber, while singing a jaunty tune about little banthas all in a row.

She is one of nature’s cooker of meals, baker of cookies, dryer of tears and patter of backs. She will undoubtedly have at least ten grandchildren and will remember all their birthdays, hobbies, and favorite colors.

She just happens to want to crush planets while she does it.

There is a not-insignificant swath of the galaxy that used to belong to the new Republic, which now belongs to Sila Rakkar. Ostensibly these planets are under control of the First Order, but nobody really believes that, not even the First Order.

The governors of enemy planets would meet with her and come away confused, holding baked goods, and wondering why they were being so unkind to this sweet woman who only wanted everyone to get along.

A few days later she would reduce a space station or two to orbital debris while they watched, then offer them more cookies.

If Kylo Ren tried this, he would be met with vows of eternal defiance. Sila Rakkar can do it and the planetary governors fold in front of her and burst into tears, and then Sila gives them a tissue and pats their shoulder and promises they can work something out.

Hux does not mess with her. Hux met her once, when the Knights were swearing allegiance to the Order, and thought she looked like an easy target. He said something condescending. Sila beamed at him and waved her hand, then leaned in and whispered something in his ear.

Hux had turned slightly green and left with unseemly haste. Sila was subsequently stationed as far from Hux as the starlanes would allow, and no one ever spoke of it again.

At least, not where Hux could hear them.

The only thing that keeps Sila Rakkar’s powers in check is the fact that her peculiar force of personality only works in person. Her crew loves her, the governors love and fear her, and that is as far as it goes. She can’t keep more than a couple of sectors under her thumb and she knows it.

“And it would be too much work,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Do you know how long it took me to break this last planet? Too many Mon Calamari. They just won’t listen to reason, and they don’t eat cookies.”

“They’re amphibious,” says Kylo Ren mildly, leaning his elbows on the desk. “I doubt they bake much underwater.”

“It’s uncivilized,” said Sila. “I had to turn a whole city into slag. The others mostly came around after that, though.” She shakes her head. “Poor dears. I felt just awful for them. Anyway, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Is this a good time?” asks Kylo Ren. An outsider might think he was being quite polite, but that’s one of their codes. _Is this line secure on your end?_

“Could be better, could be better,” she says. _No._ He watches her holographic figure spin in her swivel chair. “Is it urgent?”

“I needed your recipe for banana bread.” _It is time-sensitive, but not an emergency._ He can’t help but roll his eyes a bit for this one. On the other hand, if he’d asked her to bake him a cake, the _Steadfast_ would be hurtling in at lightspeed to his last known location, guns already powering up, and heaven help the enemy.

There’s similar codes for each of the Knights of Ren. Kylo has them all memorized.

Sila nods. “Hmm, it’s a complicated one. Picking the right bananas is hard. You want them ripe, but not _too_ ripe.”

“It’s for a friend.”

She wriggles her eyebrows. “Ideally they should be going a bit black around the peel, and spotty. Unless they’re the little red ones, then they should be completely black and maybe a bit mushy on the ends.”

Kylo’s starting to wonder if they’re still talking in code or if she’s actually gotten side-tracked thinking about banana bread. “Uh…”

She grins. “The _Steadfast_ is due in drydock. I was thinking maybe we’d head over to Bellwether Station. The crew’s been so good lately, they deserve a little R &R, better than the usual. You should come out! I’ll show you how to select a proper banana.”

He thinks for a minute. Bellwether is about halfway between his location and hers. She’s setting up a convenient meeting point.

“Sounds good,” he says. “Things have been…interesting…around here.”

“Snoke turning up dead, I should think so!” Her eyes are bright with interest, even thought the turquoise hologram. “You can give me all the juicy gossip.”

“I’ll do my best. Kylo out.”

He taps his fingers together. Hux was undoubtedly listening in on the call somehow. Snoke had master codes that encrypted everything, but that only works on his end. The First Order will hear Sila’s end of things before the day is out.

He decides to beat Hux to it. He punches an order into the computer, tells it to get the shuttle ready, and informs his general that he will be going to Bellwether Station to speak to one of his Knights.

 

* * *

 

 

Kylo spots Sila Rakkar from across the concourse of Bellwether Station. He’s got a pair of guards with him, but they hang well back. She waves to him and he lifts a gloved hand lazily in her direction.

He rises as she comes to the table. They’re being formal, which means he’s got the mask on and she’s wearing the black uniform, cloak and lightsaber and all.

She’s just the only person he knows who gives the impression that she’s got an apron on, too.

For a fairly hefty fee, there is a room that one can rent by the hour, which promises absolute secrecy. There are white-noise generators and surveillance scramblers, every fragment of technology that can be had to ensure a private conversation.

His guards station themselves at the door. She cocks an eyebrow at him. “You want me to hand over my lightsaber too, big guy?”

This is more than courtesy on her part. Kylo Ren can overpower her, both physically and with the Force, and both of them know it. But offering up her lightsaber is a symbolic recognition that if he’s planning on meting out punishment, she won’t try to defend herself. She’s loyal to him, even if costs her.

He meets this loyalty with his own. “If I cannot trust my Knights, I can trust no one.”

Which he probably can't, and they both know it. But Sila Rakkar has been with him since the very beginning, and if someone tries to buy her, she'll at least give Kylo Ren a chance to match their price.

They walk into the silent room together.

 

As soon as the door closes and a pleasant computer voice informs them that silent mode is engaged, Sila grins up at him. He pulls his mask off and plants a kiss on top of her head. “Hey, Sila.”

“Hey, big guy. Been too long.” She poked him in the ribs. “They feeding you on that ship?”

“Well enough.” He drops the mask on the table. He feels himself relaxing, the way he hardly ever relaxes any more. He’s with one of the few people in the galaxy who he is nearly sure has his back.

Part of it’s Sila herself, of course. She constantly warps the Force around her, putting people near her at ease. It’s not entirely conscious on her part and he could resist it if he chose, but he generally chooses to enjoy the effect.

“Seen any of the others recently?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “Not since I sent everyone out.”

She nods. “Saw Ban Kalla a few months back. He’s keeping well.”

Kylo nods.

“Snoke’s done, though, I hear. Unless the old buzzard is faking his death?”

“No, I chopped him in half.”

“Oh, well done!”

“If anyone asks, the Resistance’s pet Jedi did it.”

“Sure, sure. Great tragedy. Cried myself to sleep at night.” She waves her hand. Sila’s hated Snoke for years, ever since he ordered one of the other Knights on a suicide mission as an oblique way of punishing Kylo Ren. “You did the right thing sending us out. He’d have picked us off one by one to get to you. Rough for you, though.”

Kylo shrugs.

She reads this, correctly, as indication that he doesn’t want to talk about it. “So! What do you need done? Somebody assassinated? Make it look like an accident? Is it Hux? Tell me it’s Hux.”

“It’s not Hux.”

Sila shakes her head sadly. “It _could_ be Hux. You say the word, I’ll see that man dies shitting himself.”

There is a brief pause in the silenced room while they both contemplate this image.

“Errr…no. I’d rather not upend the First Order just yet.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“No.”

“I’ll go privateer. _Steadfast_ follows me, not the Order.”

“Not yet.”

She narrows her eyes. “You didn’t really call me here for banana bread, did you? I mean, I’ll teach you, but I warn you, baking will break your heart.”

Kylo Ren reaches out, lays a finger alongside her temple, and murmurs “Shields?”

She drops hers politely, and he places an image in her mind. Rey, standing in the throne room. Rey in the forest, clutching a lightsaber. Rey, drenched in the downpour on Ach-To…

“Aw, she’s a cute little thing. But too thin!” Sila scowls at him. “What are you feeding her?”

“I’m _not_ feeding her.”

“I can tell! What’s wrong with you? Get that woman a cheesecake!”

He gazes at the ceiling. “Sila, I don’t _have_ her. She’s on the run. With the Resistance.”

“Well, make sure she gets a good meal before you execute her.”

“I’m not going to execute her.” He puts his head in his hands. “I’m trying to seduce her.”

Sila stares at him, biting her lip so hard that it vanishes completely.

“Go ahead, laugh,” he says wearily. “I know.”

“Oh, hon.” She pats his arm. “It’s not that bad. You’re tall, dark and broody, and women love that.” She considers. “Well, some women.”

Unstated between them is that Sila herself is not that sort of woman. Kylo Ren is nothing but grateful for this fact.

When they left the training temple in flames, Sila’d had a lover. He’d been blonde and chiseled and radiated the Light side of the Force like an open flame. You could stand next to him and feel yourself turning into a better person, almost involuntarily. They’d trained together almost since he arrived, ate together, fought together, slept together in one bed.

Sila had glanced at Kylo, one quick flick of her eyes in his direction, and then thrown herself into the young man’s arms.

He had caught her, turned to face Kylo Ren, and held up his lightsaber, ready to face them all or die trying. He had looked for a moment like one of the old legends of Jedi Knights come back to life.

Sila had reached up and coolly slit his throat from behind.

Even then, as young and callow as he was, Kylo recognized it for what it was—a declaration of loyalty. _I will give this up for you._

He has never, in all the years since then, doubted Sila Rakkar.

He has also never once been tempted to view her as anything but a loyal subordinate and a mostly-trusted friend.

This is the manifestation of that loyalty—that when he says he is trying to seduce Rey, she does not question why or for what reason or if it is wise. If Kylo Ren wants her, Sila Rakkar will deliver her. In chains if need be.

(He is fully aware that there is another side to this equation. The day will probably come, if they all live that long, when Sila will call him up and inform him that one of her grandchildren is in trouble. When that day comes, Kylo Ren will turn the entire goddamn fleet over to her if that’s what it takes, because loyalty is pledged from both sides.)

“All right,” she says. “What do you need?”

He tells her.

Sila thinks about this, drumming her fingers on the table. She still doesn’t ask why. _Why_ is not her concern.

“Long or short term?” she asks.

“Long,” he says, not hesitating. He wants Rey to join him willingly, not be used and thrown aside in a matter of days.

“Ah, make it tricky, why don’t you…?” she mutters. “Give me what you’ve got, and let’s see what I’ve got to work with.”

He strips off his glove this time and takes her hand, palm up. The connection is similar to the Force Bond, but not nearly so strong.

He can do that with most of the Knights of Ren, but only in physical proximity, and both of them have to work at it.

Sila’s easy to connect with. She appears in his mind looking almost exactly as she does in reality. The only difference is crouched behind her: an immense predatory beast, cloaked in shadow, that smells intensely of gingerbread.

“Lay it on me,” she says.

He splays out the memories of his interactions with Rey, like a deck of cards. She pulls them out one by one, examines each. She begins humming under her breath, the song about little banthas all in a row.

Behind her, the predator watches him with hidden eyes. He can hear its breathing.

“Oh, not bad,” she murmurs, interrupting her humming. “That was a nice bit of work on the planet there.”

“Thanks.” Honestly, he’s just glad someone appreciates it. Rey certainly doesn’t.

“Okay.” She sits back. “That’s a lot to work with. A three-muffin problem at the very least. Give me a bit.”

Kylo Ren inclines his head politely to the predator. The shadows part long enough for him to make out claws, teeth, muscle, and then it bows back to him, slow and fluid.

Kylo Ren realized a long time ago that the _real_ Sila’s not the one in front.

He lets the connection drop, but the smell of gingerbread lingers for long minutes afterward.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know virtually nothing about the Knights of Ren in canon, so I am just making wildly shit up out of whole cloth here.

Kylo Ren spends the evening roaming Bellwether Station, which has a gorgeous view of the planet rotating beneath it. When he leans against one of the massive plasteel windows, he catches an echo of his scavenger’s thoughts. She, too, is looking down on a planet, but she’s less happy about it.

Ironically, he recognizes it. There’s not many worlds that he can pick out reliably by sight—they all blend together after awhile. Clouds look like clouds pretty much wherever you go. Green looks like green. If you can make out the edges of a continent, it’s easier, but there’s too many worlds in the galaxy for the human mind to know them all.

This one’s a gas giant, though, with a distinctive set of double rings. Dornu IV. There’s a pair of moons around it that are habitable, and presumably she’ll be going to one of those.

They used to be hotbeds of Resistance activity, but they haven’t been for some time. There was a bloodless coup and the new government decided it would be better to work with the First Order.

He wonders if Rey knows that.

He leans forward until his shadow blocks the reflection of the space station behind him and murmurs to the glass, _Are you in danger?_

Surprise. Wariness. He catches echoes of angry retorts she doesn’t make, but she’s got the beast under control for the moment.

Interesting.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I hope not.”

He nods. _If you are captured, hold on. I will find you._

Which is a reassurance or a threat, depending on which side of the glass you’re standing on. He can tell that she doesn’t know how to take it.

“I don’t need you to rescue me!” she growls, and throws an image at him of the throne room, where her lightsaber was the one that saved him.

He smiles lazily at her reflection and gives her back the image a few moments before it, when she knelt at his feet with her throat offered up like a sacrifice.

She doesn’t like that at all. She gives him the fight in the forest, the breaking lightsaber. “I’m stronger than you are.”

_Yes. You are._ This is true and he sees no point in denying it.

She isn’t expecting that. Her reflection glowers at him, then returns to looking at the planet.

Is he making a hash of things? He isn’t sure. He wishes Sila were here to tell him.

“Why are you singing?” asks Rey finally.

_Singing?_

“It’s weird. Something about banthas.”

He starts to laugh. _I’m not singing. It’s stuck in my head._ _Nine little banthas, all in a row…one falls down, eight to go…Eight little banthas, all in a row…_

“How did you get a song about banthas stuck in your head?”

_It’s complicated_ , he says, and breaks the connection before she sees too much and learns that he’s been asking someone else about her.

 

* * *

 

Sila comes back in the morning carrying a basket of muffins, which she hands to random people, causing a minor stir on the station concourse. His guards try to look like they’re not interested, but she pulls a second basket out from under her cloak. “And these are just for you two!”

They look at the muffins. They look at Kylo Ren. They look at the muffins again.

“We’ll be a few minutes,” he says, ushering Sila into the silenced room again. As soon as the door closes, he knows that the guards are going to be shoveling muffins into their mouths.

He doesn’t even try to fight it. In a few weeks, these guards are probably going to put in for a transfer to the _Steadfast_. He’ll approve it if they do. He doesn’t remember either of their names, but Sila’s probably already learned their birthdays, deepest fears, and favored dessert topping.

This is fine. The only fact that Kylo Ren needs to remember is that Sila Rakkar isn’t gunning for his job.

Once she’s inside the room, she’s all business. “You’ve got two choices, big guy,” she says. “And I don’t recommend the first one, but I’ll give it to you anyway.”

He sits down opposite her at the table. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

“The first one is to send one of us out after her. I’d suggest me or Krall, and of the two, I’d be better. Krall can’t quite pull off ‘father figure’ yet.” (Krall is one of the other Knights, the only one that Kylo Ren would put up against Sila for pure persuasive power.)

“But you don’t recommend it,” he says, leaning back in his chair.

She shakes her head. “Look, I can bring her around for a little while. Hell, give me a couple of weeks and I’ll have her eating out of your hand. But that’s going to last right up until she gets enough training to realize what’s happened and snap all that nice conditioning I’ve planted in her brain, and then…” She mimes an explosion with her hands. “This is not what we call a promising start to a long-term relationship.”

He raises an eyebrow at that.

“Full disclosure,” she adds. “This would be the easiest method for you. No muss, no fuss, one scavenger delivered, please tip your delivery Knight. And if you were only interested in the short term—couple of nights of passion, then so sorry my dear, time for you to take a stroll out the airlock without a suit—I’d even suggest it. But you’re not.”

He sighs. “No. I’m not.” He wants more and he knows it.

“Mmm-hmm. This isn’t all altruism on my part, big guy. I don’t mind a new player in the power structure, but I don’t want to start with her hating my guts. I want to be able to support you and whoever you’re allied with. You and I have a very solid working relationship and I’d like to think we’d be polite enough to notify each other if that looks like changing.”

Kylo Ren makes an affirmative gesture with his gloved hand. “We’re agreed on that.” (The truth is, if he ever needs to take Sila Rakkar out, he’ll do it himself. Partly that’s courtesy, but partly he doesn’t trust anyone but himself not to be persuaded to let her go.)

“All that said, if you make the call, you know I’ll do my best to bring her in.”

He nods. “Can you?”

“Of course.”

He can read her from across the table and he knows she’s speaking the truth. And if he gives the order, she will do it.

Rey, eating out of his hand. Rey, gazing up at him adoringly, finally at his side.

It’s tempting. He won’t lie. But Sila’s not wrong about how it will end.

“What’s my second option?”

She’s silent for a moment. Then she reaches down, unhooks her lightsaber from her belt, and lays it on the table.

They both look at it.

“Kylo,” she says—she _never_ calls him Kylo, she’s called him “big guy” since the day they met—“for this conversation, remember that I am _not_ your enemy.”

From someone else, he’d almost be hurt. From Sila, it’s a warning. She’s about to say something he’s not going to like. But she’s disarmed herself completely—hell, her shields are even down now, as clear a statement of submission as a dog showing its throat—because she knows that even at his worst, Kylo Ren won’t kill an unarmed friend.

He lets his breath out in a long sigh. “I’d remember that even if you were armed to the teeth. Say what you need to say.”

“Your scavenger girl is alone,” says Sila Rakkar. “She’s lonely. She doesn’t know her place in the world and she’s terrified that there isn’t one. She’s gone from place to place, looking for someone to save the Resistance. Skywalker. You. Now all these old allies. It never occurs to her that she could be the one who saves…anyone.”

He waits, elbows on the table, gloved hands folded in front of his lips.

Sila flicks the Force, pushes her lightsaber a few inches farther away. Harder to grab, if it comes to that. He watches out of his peripheral vision, not taking his eyes off her face.

(There’s no connection open between them, but he can still see the shadowed predator, the real Sila, pacing nervously back and forth.)

“You were like that once. When the Temple burned. You knew your place and then you didn’t. You had all of us behind you, all the Knights. We’d done terrible things for you, and you were just as terrified of letting us down. I don’t think that you kept a meal down for a week.”

This is true.

He hates to remember that time. He hates to remember himself then, pathetic, mewling, half out of his mind with fear of what he’d just done. He hates that Sila saw that— _but of course, she would have_ —that she saw him in the depths of weakness, flailing, not knowing what to do.

  _Just a child…in a mask…_

This time he’s the one who pushes the lightsaber away with the Force.

“Continue,” he says, his voice flat.

She’s not a coward. She recites the litany of his failures, as if they weren’t standing on the knife-edge of Kylo Ren’s temper.

“You didn’t think that you could be a power unto yourself. You were afraid of the power within you. You took us all to Snoke and swore allegiance because you wanted someone else to tell you that you were doing the right thing.”

Sila had disagreed with that choice, but she had followed him anyway. He knew that.

It had cost several of the Knights their lives, and he knew that, too. Their dying screams haunt his sleep at night.

He had killed his father because Snoke commanded it, and he would never quite be sure that he had done it of his own accord.

“Your point?” His voice is chipped from ice.

“My point is _that_ is where this girl is now.” Sila leans forward. “She doesn’t need an enemy. She needs someone who knows their place in the world. She needs a solid place to stand.”

“What does that _mean?”_

Sila sighs and suddenly looks a good bit older than her years. “It means that if you rush in and overpower her by being…you…it’s going to panic her. She needs a shoulder to cry on and somebody to hold her and say ‘It’s all right. You’ve done well.’”

“I’m not good at that, Sila.”

“You can be damn good at it, if you get out of your own way.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Oh hell, Kylo, don’t you remember after the temple? After I…” She mimes a gesture, one finger dragged across her throat. She won’t say the Jedi’s name. As far as Kylo Ren knows, she hasn’t said it in all the years since she killed him.

And he does remember suddenly. It was buried down in that horrible flight from the burning temple, all of them crowded onto a single shuttle, terrified out of their minds and half-sick with the crimes they’d just committed. Sila, wiping her hands over and over on her robes, rubbing the skin raw, trying to get the young Jedi’s blood off her hands.

He’d grabbed both her wrists and pinned her against his chest and just held her while she shuddered. And he’d said—what had he said? He couldn’t even remember now.

Sila silently lays her hand, palm up, on the table.

He strips off his glove and takes it.

The memory is right there. The smell hits him first, the recycled air of the shuttle, but it can’t quite keep up because all of them are sweating, not with heat but with terror, and the shuttle is full of the cold rank stench of fear.

He’s in Sila’s head, so he’s much shorter than usual and he’s looking up at himself, looking impossibly young and all she can think is _He’ll see that I’m breaking, he’ll see it, I have to keep him from seeing it_ but there was so much blood and if she can just get the blood off, it will be better, then it will be something that she _did,_ not something that she’s still doing, over and over again…

Kylo Ren looks up at his younger self and the Sila in his head trusts that self and he wants to scream at her _Oh god, can’t you see how stupid I am, can’t you see that I have no idea what I’m doing, don’t trust me, I’m winging it, I’m only doing this because Skywalker tried to kill me…_

But Sila has faith in that stupid young man. And the much younger Kylo Ren takes her hands to keep her from scrubbing the skin off and wraps his arms around her and puts his chin on top of her head and says “We’ll get through this. I promise. We’re in this together. _No one will leave you behind.”_

He isn’t expecting the sudden rush of relief that Sila feels then, that she’s thrown her lot in with her chosen leader and he’s seen her weakness and he hasn’t flinched from it. She hasn’t failed him. Her sacrifice was accepted and he knows what it cost her and it was _enough._

The memory ends. Sila pulls her hand back, too quickly, and rubs her fingers.

He knows that showing him that cost her. No Sith likes to be vulnerable in front of another one, and in some ways, Sila’s closer to a Sith than he is.

Kylo exhales slowly. Yes. He remembers now. He did something like that for most of the Knights, didn’t he? And at the time thought nothing of it, didn’t think of it as something he was even doing.

“And that helped?”

She nods. “That was what I needed to hear.”

“I wasn’t lying,” he says.

“No, you weren’t. I’d have spotted a lie a mile off. Don’t lie to your scavenger girl, either.” She shakes her head. _“That’s_ where you have to go. You have to get your head back into that place. That awful damn place. Remember what you needed in that moment. Remember what _we_ needed in that moment.” She looks as if she’s swallowed something distasteful, but adds “Hell, remember whatever Snoke gave you, right then. That was something you needed, whatever it was.”

“You think I made the wrong decision, though. With Snoke.”

“So? You want her to make the wrong decision, too. To go with you.”

“Is that the wrong decision?”

“For a Jedi? Of course.”

He lets that one go, leans back in the chair. “So your advice is to go back to the single worst time in my life. Relive _that._ For a desert rat from Jakku.”

“Did you think love was easy?” asks Sila Rakkar.

The word strikes him like a body blow. His first instinct is to lash out.

She sits absolutely still, offering no target for his wrath.

“I’m not interested in _love,_ ” he growls.

“The fuck you aren’t.”

Sila delivers this statement with no inflection whatsoever. It would be incredibly rude to destroy her lightsaber for telling the truth, so he puts one of the unused chairs into the wall with his mind. Neither of them bother to look at it.

They sit in absolute silence for a few moments. She waits for him to be the one to speak.

Finally he does. “So. Remember the lowest I’ve ever been, and then remember what I wanted. And give her whatever that is.”

“That’s my advice, yes. The world’s unkind, big guy. Make yourself the one thing in it that she can turn to for comfort.”

“What if she finds someone else to comfort her?” Thinking of the young man in the leather jacket in the forest.

“Have them killed. _Obviously.”_

Well, they agree on that much.

“I don’t like this, Sila.”

The memories of that time are still raw. He’s avoided them for a long time, never given them a chance to scar over, to become callused through handling and time. She’s telling him to crack them open and bleed.

“You asked me for advice. You want comforting nonsense, that’s somebody else’s job.” She waves her hand. “I know, I know, you’d probably rather screw her brains out and then go for breakfast afterward, but that’s not where she’s at right now.”

He snorts. “This is not the sort of seduction advice I was hoping for.”

“Yeah, well. Work up to that. Give her a taste of what it could be like, sure, but leave her wanting more. If you’re not sure, back the hell off.” She narrows her eyes thoughtfully. “Although…do you know how the next guy got me in bed after…well, after?”

Kylo coughs. “Is this something I _need_ to know?” He’s sure Sila has a sex life—she’s going to have to get those grandkids somehow—but she's like a sister and he’d rather not think about it.

“Suck it up, buttercup, this might be useful.” She grins at him, but there’s a shadow behind it. “I told him I was a monster. He said that I was a beautiful monster. Whatever I had done, I was still beautiful to him.”

Kylo Ren blinks a few times.

Sila Rakkar nods. She’s not at all his idea of sexy, and yet Kylo can suddenly picture that unknown lover, saying the words that she needed to hear.

“Remember that,” she says. “I wouldn’t have believed him if he’d said I wasn’t one. I know damn well what I am. Your girl’s frightened of what she might become. And she ought to be frightened, so don’t lie to her. But maybe give some thought to beautiful monsters.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alas, we bid farewell to Sila Rakkar. If anybody else wants to use her in a fic, she is free for the taking.
> 
> And now back to the plot!

Sila says one thing more to him, as they’re saying their goodbyes, before he left Bellwether Station.

“Taken a look at yourself recently, big guy?”

He’s wearing the mask, but he turns his head toward her, puzzled. She reaches up and taps his chest armor, over his heart.

He hasn’t. He’s had more important things to worry about than the condition of his soul.

He looks.

The black tide is still there. It’s always there. But gleaming through it, in long phosphorescent wakes, are streaks of light.

It doesn’t look like conflict. It doesn’t look like someone claiming there’s still good in him. It looks like a night ocean, lapping at an unknown shore.

It is still unexpected.

He wonders how Sila sees it. Everyone has their own mental construct for other Force users.

He wonders how Rey would see it.

“Relax,” murmurs Sila under her breath. “I’m loyal to you, not the Dark. It’s about half bullshit anyway. We start getting in a competition for who’s got the purest black little heart, nothing’s gonna get done for a month.” She steps back. “Take care of yourself, big guy.”

“And you,” says Kylo Ren, through the mask. He bows to Sila Rakkar, and she hands him a basket of banana bread and he goes to his shuttle, still thinking about beautiful monsters.

There’s a moment when he’s stepping into the shuttle that he feels Rey beside him. She’s stepping down out of the Falcon so that it’s like they’re mirror images, dark and light. Except that his darkness has light in it now, and her light is etched with grey.

He feels for an instant as if he’s on the cusp of some great realization, and then she steps down and he sees her face.

She’s afraid.

His first instinct is to find whatever is frightening her and hack it apart until it stops moving.

But he fights that down and thinks of Sila’s advice. _Go to that terrible place, and remember what you needed…_

 

* * *

 

 

Rey steps down from the Millenium Falcon. She’s dressed for the snow this time, thick gloves and heavy boots. Space, she hopes the next stop is on a desert planet. Her blood is too thin for this weather. She wants heat that blazes up from the sand like the surface of an oven, a white sun that bakes you down to bone.

She’s thinking about weather so she doesn’t think about what’s ahead of her.

She is terrified. She is terrified of how badly she could screw this up. She’s already had to make one call to General Organa, telling her that Admiral Anhar was no longer a friend of the Resistance. These are diplomats and Rey’s a scavenger rat from a backwater. She doesn’t know how to make words into weapons. And she failed once already, failed so badly that Kylo Ren had to save her, and that’s a whole lifetime worth of shame concentrated right there.

Of course that thought summons him. The man turns up at the worst moments, in her most dismal weaknesses. She hates it. And him.

_Yes, it’s lovely to see you, too._

She feels him glance around her, stretch his senses out to see where she’s standing. _Ah, let’s see. Dornu IV’s got two moons, and the one is an ocean world, and you’re in a forest, so you’re on…Gull’s World?_

“Shit!” Her first instinct is to bolt back to the _Falcon_ and lift off at once, because the First Order knows they’re here, and she’s got to get out before they find her contacts, everyone’s in danger—

_Oh, relax._ His mental voice is dry. _I’m nowhere near a star destroyer at the moment and I honestly don’t care who you’re talking to. Dornu System’s been pacified for months and if somehow the Resistance does get a foothold, it’s somebody else’s problem. The First Order’s got governors to worry about that sort of thing. And how am I going to explain this, anyway? “Yes, I had a vision while I was looking out the window, so go destabilize a planetary government because a Resistance person visited it once, please.”_

“Why should I believe you?”

He folds his arms, leans against the shuttle wall. _Even if you don’t believe me, the gizka is out of the bag on this one, isn’t it? But if you think I can scramble the First Order fleet to come find you on this short a notice…_

Rey grudgingly admits that this is probably not the case. She’s been appalled at how slowly the Resistance moves, and it was a much smaller group of people, with Leia Organa at the top. The First Order moves on military time, which is a combination of blindingly fast and ponderously slow.

She keeps walking through the forest. She can feel that there’s a live planet around her, but her mind is oddly clear, as if some background noise had been cut out.

_That would be the shields._

Rey lowers them experimentally and immediately feels the pressure building around her, a white-noise hiss of life and death surrounding her on all sides. The Force is not so responsive as it was on the farmworld, but she has the sense of a living planet that could possibly notice her, if she did anything foolish.

She puts them back up in a hurry.

_Well done. You’re getting good with those._

 She doesn’t want to admit that his praise warms her. She bites her lower lip, checks the coordinates again. There’s a tiny tracking module on her wrist that shows her a red arrow, she just has to walk toward it.

So she does.

The forest is dark but the snow reflects enough light to see by. It reminds her uncomfortably of Starkiller Base and the red gleam of a lightsaber shining off the snow.

She had been angry then, too.

_I remember._

She’d slashed his face open, left him with a scar that he’d bear until the day he died. And still he seems amused by this. She sees gloved fingers trace the line on his face, almost tenderly.

_Not the only mark you’ve left on me._

“I don’t want to talk. I’m _busy.”_

_Very well._

And then there is a soft touch with the Force as if he brushed his lips across her forehead, and he whispers _Stay safe._

Then he’s gone, which is good, because otherwise he’d see that she stumbled as she walked, thrown badly off her stride.

She rubs her forehead. She can still feel the kiss which is stupid, it wasn't even _real_ and how _dare_ he and...

On the other hand, she’s arrived at the spot marked by the red arrow, and she didn’t spend most of the walk in a gnawing panic, so maybe he did her some good after all.

She looks around and sees it finally—a little concrete bunker, left over from some old munitions storage. Nearly impossible to spot from the air. If you were two diplomats meeting in a very hushed fashion with a fugitive, it’s the sort of place you’d pick.

The metal door is ajar. Rey takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and goes in to represent the Resistance.


	14. Chapter 14

It starts to go bad almost at once.

The two diplomats are human, one old and querulous, one young and oily. She dislikes them both immediately.

It doesn’t help that Oily—she forgets his real name as soon as he says it—starts the conversation by saying “There is no question of us continuing to support the Resistance. Consider this to be an exit interview.”

“No question,” adds Querulous, although his voice wavers, so _no question_ comes out sounding very much like a question itself.

“Why?” she asks.

“The people of Gull’s World must look to the future,” said Oily.

“…the future…” adds Querulous.

“It’s obvious that the Resistance can no longer function.”

“…not at all…”

“Only because its allies won’t come to its aid!” snaps Rey. “Why didn’t you come when you heard our distress signal?”

“We serve the will of the people.”

“That’s right. That’s right. Will of the people…”

“And the people no longer wish to back a losing war. The First Order is here and it must be dealt with. As your Resistance made clear, those who oppose the Order die on little backwater planets. Our people have no desire to join them.” Oily nods vigorously at her, as if he can compel her agreement.

Rey’s head is starting to throb now. They keep talking, the both of them, saying basically the same thing, over and over—the First Order is the future, the Resistance is doomed, no one is coming to help…

“People died!” she interrupts. “You didn’t come to help us and our people died because of it!”

In her head, the rage-beast is snarling. She can feel it clawing at the backs of her eyeballs. The edge of her vision is starting to go red and she fights it back, she has to keep her temper, the General is relying on her to make these two pompous bastards face the truth…

Oily dismisses the Resistance deaths with a flick of his fingers. “Obviously any death is a tragedy.”

“…a great tragedy…”

“But the fact that you cannot defend your own people is proof that you can offer us nothing in an alliance. We must take care of our own people first.”

“You were our allies,” whispers Rey. She’s hearing his words as if from a long way away. The red in her vision is rising and the beast is howling to be let out, to teach these two the price of disloyalty.

“Alliances change,” says Oily. “The Resistance may need us, but we do not need the Resistance. It is increasingly questionable whether anyone does.”

She can picture the two of them standing in a room, watching the distress call come in, and turning their backs on it. _A great tragedy,_ one will say to the other. _But we do not need them._

The lightsaber on her belt is hard and cold, the ridged activation button under her fingers. She can feel the raised scars on the metal where she repaired it with the welder.

“But General Organa—“ she begins.

 “…is obsolete,” says Querulous, and sits back, a satisfied smile on his face, whether because of his words or because he finally got to an answer before Oily, Rey doesn’t know.

“And that’s all there is to it,” said the other diplomat. “I think we’re done here.”

“No,” says Rey softly, her fingers closing over the lightsaber, “not quite.”

 

* * *

           

Kylo Ren is gazing out the viewport in his cabin on the shuttle when he hears the scream of rage.

It’s so loud that for a minute he thinks it’s actually coming from the shuttle, that any second his guards are going to burst in to tell him there’s some alien animal stowed away in the cargohold and they’re returning to the station immediately.

But he realizes, with his ears still ringing, that it’s coming from inside his head, and since he’s actually feeling rather calm at the moment, that means it’s coming from his scavenger girl.

A moment later he feels it, the black tide pouring in through the connection between them, as Rey falls headlong into the dark.

She’s strong. Space, she’s so damn strong. He wasn’t lying to her. He’s got more training and a lot more experience, but for raw power, she’s more than his match. Kylo has to set his mental feet and haul backward to keep from being dragged down into the dark with her, and that’s—honestly, that’s pretty hilarious, he’ll get a good laugh at the irony later, here she is the Jedi and _she’s_ in danger of dragging _him_ down—and she’s screaming with rage and he can hear the whine of her lightsaber and somebody else is screaming, he can hear that through her ears, and then they cut off abruptly and she is standing in a silent space with the black tide rushing through her, wanting something else to kill and kill and keep on killing…

He can’t let that rage take him or he’ll go slaughter his own guards and then probably slice apart the shuttle around him and that would be very, very bad. He doesn’t want to end his days in a derelict shuttle, waiting for the oxygen to run out.

_Swear to god, I cannot leave that girl alone for five minutes..._

Kylo Ren grits his teeth and pushes back against the tide.

 

* * *

 

 

There is nothing living in the bunker by the time Rey is done.

She turns off the lightsaber. She walks outside, her head held high, her mind a red darkness.

She makes six steps into the forest and falls to her knees, retching.

What have I done?

What have I done?

The forest is cold and the snow crunches under her hands and knees. The trees are stark black lines.

I killed our allies

(they abandoned us)

I killed them

(they betrayed the general)

I killed them

Her stomach heaves. Bile burns her throat.

She can’t think. Or all she can do is think, which is worse. She keeps seeing their faces and hearing the lightsaber hum and the beast inside her has blood on its teeth now and it won’t stop it will never stop there will always be blood what has she _done?_

The beast is quieting now. Sated.

Of course it is. It’s been fed.

She retches violently, as if her body is trying to physically reject what she’s becoming.

 _I threw up for a week after I burned the temple_ , whispers Kylo Ren.

He’s here. Of course he’s here. He’s got the other half of the beast, the twin to hers. And he’s always here. Every time she is drowning in the dark, she finds him.

She hates him, but at least he’s familiar.

“I killed them,” she tells him.

_I know._

Ghostly fingers touch the back of her neck, curl in her hair. She wants to respond and recoil, all at once. It feels like comfort and she does not deserve it, she deserves only contempt, she has killed innocent men whose only crime was representing their people…but oh gods and ghosts, she wants so badly to be comforted…

_I did, too._

She feels his memory rather than sees it. Someone holding her upright, warm hands gripping her forearms. A young man’s voice, familiar to Kylo Ren, but not to Rey, saying “You had to do it. You had to. We know you had to.”

“Who was that?”

_One of the other students. One of my Knights._

She’s never thought of the other students. Skywalker had told her that Kylo Ren had taken a handful of students with him, and yet she’d never thought about them.

 _It doesn’t matter._ He sounds tired in her head. _I sent most of them away to keep them safe from Snoke._ _The rest are dead or gone._ A quick flicker of images—blood, darkness, Snoke frowning, the silence of space. All that she needs to know.

Even through her own horror, her heart seizes. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and then another bout of violent nausea seizes her.

The sense of presence grows stronger. She feels hands on her shoulders, helping her upright.

 _Eat snow,_ he suggestes. _It will help a little._

She obeys, wiping at her streaming face with her sleeve.

It does help. The cold soothes her burning throat, chills the heat inside her.

_Not too much. You’ll freeze. I suppose they don’t have snow on Jakku, do they?_

Rey shrugs. It doesn’t matter what happens to her. Let her freeze. Let her die. It’s better that way.

_Now listen. You can’t just run away to the ship yet. You’ve killed two powerful men. Whoever finds the bodies will know that a lightsaber was used._

“I’ll turn myself in,” she whispers. “Or I’ll kill myself.”

_Don’t be stupid._

“But I _killed_ them!” Even as she says it, she knows that it was not the whole truth. She’s killed before. This was murder, plain and simple.

_Execution. There is a price for disloyalty and they paid it._

“But—“

A mental slap. She jerks her head back, even though it's not physical, only a shock of energy against her shields.

 _Stop. Wallowing._ His eyes glitter inside her head. _This isn’t about_ you. _What do you think will become of your precious Resistance when people learn that their pet Jedi killed their former allies?_

Cold sinks into Rey’s belly that has nothing to do with the snow.

She swallows and swipes her sleeve across her eyes. Finn. Poe. Rose. General Organa. Her friends.

All of them shamed, all hope lost, if this ever comes to light.

She can feel Kylo Ren standing beside her, his arms folded, waiting for her.

She has no idea what to do next.

But he does.

Confidence radiates off him like heat. He’s probably hidden more bodies than anyone will ever know. She reaches for that confidence, even as part of her recoils in horror.

“What do I do, then?” she asks, in a strangled voice.

He nods approvingly. _You make it look like someone else did it. Incinerate the bodies so no one can tell how they died. There’s a First Order weapons cache on an asteroid not that far away that should contain some explosives, if you don’t have any on your ship._

Rey narrows her eyes. “Why are you helping me? Why are you helping the _Resistance?”_

She feels him sigh.

 _Damned if I know,_ he says, and the connection fades away and leaves her alone in the forest with the bloody snow.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am the worst sort of sucker for a good hurt/comfort.

In the end, Rey did not use explosives. She would not be beholden to Kylo Ren in any way that she could help. There was a nest of creatures nearby—something small and fierce and toothy. She dragged the bodies out to them.

They had nothing like language, but the concept was a simple enough one.

_?meat?_ they asked.

_Meat. Yours._

_!meat!_

And that was the end of that. Soon enough there would be nothing left but chewed bones, and no way at all to tell how they had died.

She limped back to the _Falcon_ , and Chewie looked at her with somber eyes and did not ask any questions.

Now Rey curls in her bunk, shaking with aftershocks, with no idea what to do next.

I can’t be trusted, she thinks. I can’t. I killed those men. I lost my temper and I killed them.

(but they deserved to die) whispers the traitorous little voice inside her, the voice of the dark.

She’s still so angry. She can feel the anger down in her gut, the beast sleeping. It’s been glutted on those men’s deaths and it is content…for now.

How does she control it?

How does Kylo Ren control it?

Rey would crawl across broken glass on her belly to have anyone else in the world to ask, but she does not.

She reaches out to him, meaning to demand answers, meaning to _force_ him to help her—and instead, the moment the connection opens, she breaks down weeping.

She feels his surprise. She waits for another mental slap, something to force them both back into their respective roles, the Jedi and the Sith, the light and the dark.

Instead there is a long, whispered sigh across her nerves, and he puts his mental arms around her.

_Shhhhh. It will be all right. Shhhh…._

It undoes her completely.

She sobs until her eyes are swollen and her lungs ache. He holds her like no one has done since…since long, long ago, when her parents sold her, her parents who were nothing and would to god that she was only nothing herself, she is _worse_ than nothing, she is dangerous to the people she loves, she will bring down the Resistance because she cannot be trusted, because she is not safe…

_Shhh…_

She wishes he were here, really here, not a shadow of the Force. It’s not like physical contact, not really, there’s only a ghost of pressure and she needs someone to really hold her, she feels like she’s going to explode outward into Jedi-shaped shrapnel if someone doesn’t hold her together.

_I wish I could._

The pressure against skin intensifies. It’s not the same, but with her eyes closed, she can almost pretend it’s real. He’s stretched out full length on her bunk, holding her in the crook of his arm, and his free hand moves over her hair in slow strokes. Her hair’s come out of its bands again, but that’s the least of her worries right now.

Rey knows she’s alone in the bunk. Hell, she knows she’s alone in the universe, if it comes to that. But almost the fabric against her cheek could be his shirt and almost there could be a heartbeat under it.

The beast inside her quiets. The guilt probably never will. Any decent person would turn away from her if they knew what she had done.

Any decent person.

Which is probably why Kylo Ren is the one holding her in the dark.

“I want to go home,” she whispers into what feels like his shoulder, knowing that it’s a child’s useless cry for comfort.

_All right. Where’s home?_

There isn’t one. That’s the problem. Ach-To was someone else’s home, not hers. The halls of the Falcon are more home than it was.

She could go back to Jakku but she hates Jakku, but maybe that’s all she deserves, to die with sand in her mouth like the desert rat she is…

_Stop._ Calm briefly forced down on her, from outside, as he tells her heart and her lungs to stop panicking. She isn’t angry, she isn’t grateful, it’s just a thing that’s happening now, apparently she can’t even be trusted to run her own body.

Shit, maybe she should just tell Chewbacca to take the _Falcon_ and go to Kashyyyk, at least one of them would be happy that way. She can climb down to ground level and get eaten by kinrath. A square meal for alien wildlife, maybe that’s all she’s good for now.

_Hush. That isn’t true._

It is true. She’s failed at everything now. She even failed at dying in the dirt on the farmworld, and if she’d managed _that_ , maybe those two men would still be alive and the Resistance could have sent someone else, someone better, someone who could have taken the diplomatic doublespeak and turned it back and made something useful out of it.

Someone who isn’t a monster in human form.

She thought she’d used up all her tears, but a few more leak out. Her eyes feel dry and scratchy, as if they’re full of sand.

She doesn’t dare go back to the Resistance base. She’s full of this rage and darkness now, it’s not going away, and it’s only a matter of time before she snaps and hurts something she loves.

_Come find me_ , Kylo Ren suggests. _Or I’ll find you._

She recoils at the prospect. He’s the enemy, for all he’s been holding her in the dark.

_Exactly. It doesn’t matter if you snap and hurt_ me, _does it?_ She feels, rather than sees his smile. _We’ll meet somewhere. You can even try to kill me if you want._

_Just like old times._

Oh god, she doesn’t dare, does she?

But what else is there? She can’t call General Organa and tell her the truth. She can’t go back and put her friends in danger. She’s the Resistance’s worst enemy now, even more so because they trust her, and she knows she can’t be trusted.

Maybe if she went and found Kylo Ren, she can kill him or he can kill her or they can both kill each other. Or maybe she’ll just cry until she runs out tears.

_Whichever you like._

There’s pressure under her chin, lifting her head up. He kisses her, very lightly.

For just a moment, it seems like the kiss might deepen, might become something more than comfort. But he pulls back and kisses her forehead then, and whispers _Go to sleep._

There is a hint of Persuasion to the words. Not much. She could resist it if she chose. But she is exhausted and heartsick and sleep seems like it might be better than what she’s living through right now.

“Don’t leave,” she says, gripping the shoulder that isn’t really there.

_I won’t._

_We monsters must stay together, after all…_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll be traveling for a few days, so updates may get erratic. Or maybe I'll be bored in hotel rooms with nothing to do but write fic. We'll see what happens!


	16. Chapter 16

Rey sleeps. She wakes again, realizes that the last day really happened, and lies in her bunk staring up at the ceiling. She feels hollow, as if she’s died and the wind is blowing sand through her ribcage, as if the sun has bleached her down to bones.

Her back and shoulders ache. For a minute she can’t think why, and then she remembers wrestling two dead bodies through the snow.

So. She murdered two men. And then she fed the bodies to the local wildlife. And then she cried on Kylo Ren’s shoulder. The man the First Order called the Jedi Killer.

Yes.

That really happened. It wasn’t a nightmare, or if it was, she was living through it.

The only thing that gets her moving is the fact that she has to use the ‘fresher. There’s something about a full bladder that cuts through even the deepest misery.

Once she’s out, there’s caf waiting. Chewbacca doesn’t drink it, but he makes it every day anyway. Rey didn’t have the heart at first to tell him that she didn’t drink it, so she started choking it down and now she’s hooked on it, like most of the rest of the galaxy.

She slumps down in a chair and stares into her mug. A porg whistles cheerfully from somewhere inside the wall.

“Shit,” she mutters. “Now what?”

  

* * *

 

 

On a shuttle a great distance away, Kylo Ren is also having caf, but he is in a very, very good mood indeed.

He makes a mental note to double the spies currently watching Sila. Possibly triple them. Her advice was excellent and people who are that good at understanding human nature are even more dangerous than anticipated.

(She’ll figure it out, of course, and be amused. He should probably also do something nice for her. There’s got to be a planet somewhere in a nearby sector that exports spices or cocoa or something. He’ll assign the _Steadfast_ to pacify it. Sila will appreciate that.)

It hadn’t even been that hard. A week ago, Kylo would have believed that if he got Rey in bed, in his arms, things would only have ended one way. But he’d gritted his teeth and held his baser instincts in check, and damned if it hadn’t worked.

_Make yourself the one thing she can turn to for comfort…_

And it had been good.

He’d held her half the night, a warm almost-weight in his arms, and he’d felt…peace.

 _Peace is a lie,_ the Sith code began. _There is only passion._

_Good thing I’m not entirely a Sith then, isn’t it?_

But it had been peaceful. It had been a warm, quiet space where he didn’t have to do anything or be anyone other than who he was.

Kylo Ren had grown up hedged around by expectations. First that he would grow up to become a Senator—or more—in the new Republic. Then, when the Force began to manifest, primarily through poltergeist fits, the plans changed and it was expected that he would be a Jedi. His uncle’s heir. He didn’t even have to touch the minds of people around him to feel the weight of their hopes, their plans, their agendas, coming at him from every side.

Rey would never know how much he envied her. To come from nothing! To make your own way in the galaxy, to be whatever you were born to be, without people pressing in on every side, trying to remake you into what they needed.

God, what _freedom_.

His father had fled from the expectation that a smuggler become a general. Probably it was in the blood.

The only duty Kylo Ren had taken on willingly was for the Knights of Ren. Hell, he doesn’t even want to run the First Order, but being Supreme Leader is riding a rancor—getting down is the problem.

But he doesn’t have to be that, not for awhile. Hux isn’t expecting him back any time soon. Let the man plot a coup behind his back, Kylo doesn’t care.

The beauty of his scavenger girl is that all she expects is the enemy. She’s given up redeeming him. She doesn’t even think of him as _Ben_ any longer.

She has no expectations, so anything he gives her is his own choice.

 _…through victory, my chains are broken._ _The Force will set me free._

 

* * *

 

 

Rey drinks an entire pot of caf by herself and starts to feel jittery on top of feeling miserable. She has to go to the ‘fresher three times.

But somewhere in that caffeine jag, she finds a shred of hope.

She has done a terrible thing. But she knows it is terrible, and that means that she doesn’t quite belong to the Dark yet, doesn’t it? If she was really truly evil now, she wouldn’t feel guilty. She’d feel justified. Right?

“Right?” she asks the porg, who is investigating her mug.

“Warrrrrll?”

She knows the Dark is inside her, because she can hear the little whisper of justification in her head, but as long as she stomps that down, as long as she knows that she has done a terrible thing, as long as she devotes the rest of her life to atoning for it, she’s not completely lost.

She hopes.

 _Seems logical_ , Kylo Ren says, sitting across the table from her. He’s got his own mug, which he is putting down exactly where the porg is standing. It doesn’t seem to notice.

“Are you here to seduce me to the dark side?” she demands under her breath.

 _Not before I’ve had another cup. It’s too early._ He raises an eyebrow at her, smiles just a little. _Although if you_ want _to be seduced…_

She realizes she’s blushing furiously and hides it behind the mug. “Bastard.”

His eyes gleam. She knows that he could say any number of things to this, mostly related to the fact that she spent last night in his arms, but he doesn’t. This, perversely, makes her angrier.

She tells herself to calm down. Anger is too dangerous right now.

“If I meet you, it’ll be to kill you,” she mutters. “Not to do anything like…that.”

_The two are not mutually exclusive. Though you have to do them in the right order, or else it gets weird._

Rey rubs her forehead. She can’t deny that she wants…something. But she knows perfectly well how that goes, how it always goes—you get all hot and bothered and then _he_ rolls over and goes to sleep and you’d have been better off just taking care of yourself in the first place and not having to deal with the frustration.

It isn’t until Kylo Ren sets the coffee mug down and gives an explosive laugh that he tries to pretend is a cough that she realizes some of that bled through the connection between them.

“Shit!”

He gets caf down the wrong pipe and really does cough. After a minute he says _Do I need to go to Jakku, kill some people for you?_

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

 _You don’t know, do you?_ And then, in answer to his own question, _No, of course you don’t. How could you?_

“Know what?” she grates.

_What it can be like between two Force users._

She tilts her head, baffled. “What? What are you talking about? Do you lift rocks at each other?”

He needs a moment after that. He puts his forehead down on the table, shoulders shaking. Rey wants to be pissed, but the laughter’s splashing through the connection to her and it takes effort not to join in.

_…no. No rocks._

“Whatever it is, I have no interest.” She turns away from the table, and then he shows her.

Darkness. Slick heat around him. A body moving under his, crying out his name. Pleasure fed back on itself, two sets of senses aware of every touch, building to something shattering…

Rey jumps back so violently that she has to catch herself against the wall. One of the porgs gives her a suspicious look and scurries into the crawlspace.

“What the hell was _that?!”_

_Exactly what you think it was._

She flushes. It’s a good thing no one is around to see her, because she has to be blazing red, and there’s a pulse beating in her ears and between her legs that is absolutely mortifying to contemplate.

“Why would you show me that?! And who _was_ that?”

She is horrified to find that she is jealous.

He has to have felt that. She hadn’t tamped it down nearly fast enough to stop him. But he says nothing, and she’s disgusted by her own gratitude.

 _Another Jedi student. There was…ah…rather a lot of that._ She feels his amusement, and something else—an odd, abstract fondness for the students they had been.

“I thought Jedi didn’t marry.”

 _I don’t recall anybody exchanging wedding vows. But come on, a group of teenagers all living together for years, with only Uncle Skywalker for a chaperone? The Force is powerful but it’s not_ that _powerful. You’d need…I don’t know, force cages or something. Maybe shock collars._

Rey folds her arms. “I am _not_ interested. Certainly not with _you.”_

This is absolutely a lie and she is quite sure he knows it.

 _All right,_ he says affably.

She regards him suspiciously across the table.

_When we meet, I promise, I shall not lay a finger on you..._

Rey waits for it.

_…Unless you want me to._

“I won’t.”

 _Then you have nothing to worry about._ He leans back in the chair, pulls a datapad out and taps it with his gloved fingers. Her eyes are drawn down to the motion and she thinks for half an instant about how the gloves would feel on her skin, then slaps that thought down so hard that she briefly sees double.

 _Here’s a list of planets roughly equidistant between my location and Gull’s World,_ he says calmly. _These are all nearly or completely uninhabited._ _I’ll let you pick one, so that you know I’m not leading you into a First Order trap._ He slides the datapad toward her, and if she concentrates, she can read it, even if it’s mostly a ghost of itself.

There's at least a dozen there, far more than the Order could conceivably stake out. He seems to be working in good faith...or more likely, he doesn't think he needs back up to spring his trap. Whatever it is.

“These are all desert planets,” she says slowly.          

He nods. _There’s a few tomb worlds in there that are desert-types. You’ve been dreaming about sand and heat for days._

“How do you know that?”

Kylo cocks an eyebrow in her direction. _I don’t know, maybe the fact we’ve got a_ telepathic Force bond _and every time you step foot on a cold planet, you start muttering under your breath about the desert?_

She can’t touch the datapad to select one, so she points to one at random. It’s a nice shade of orangey-red, and it’s not Jakku. _That one._

He nods and selects it. The coordinates flash up onto the screen and he chuckles to himself. _Good choice._

Rey barely notices. If he’s been picking up even her longing for heat and sunlight, she dreads what else he’s picked up. It could be anything. Fears and dreams and longings she’s been keeping hidden even from herself.

But he hasn’t said anything about those, and she’s distracted enough by that thought that she completely misses the fact that somehow she’s just agreed to meet him.


	17. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very brief interlude, hardly a full chapter. But definitely worth remembering that Kylo Ren is not a nice person.

Kylo Ren stands up.

He makes absolutely sure that the connection between them is dead. He puts up shields inside his shields. He goes to the ‘fresher, because even if she gets through those, she’ll see where he is and back the hell off.

And then he collapses against the back wall, laughing his head off.

He shouldn’t gloat. He likes gloating as much as the next person in black robes, of course, but he knows it’s dangerous. The universe can tell when you’re gloating and it loves to smack you down.

Still, even Snoke would agree he handled this well.

The datapad is still in his hand. He tosses it onto the counter. It was a very nice bit of coding, done early this morning. A dozen planets, all real, all reading out quite accurate properties about weather and climate, but the coordinates all go to the same place.

His scavenger might have noticed that if she’d spent more time looking over them, but she’d been flustered. Her face had turned absolutely scarlet when he’d slid that one memory into her head, and all she wanted was to change the subject as quickly as possible.

_Do they lift rocks at each other…_

He does feel a distinct pang. Part of it’s jealousy. Most of it is sheer frustration at other people’s incompetence. Whoever got her in bed on Jakku is seriously bringing down the male half of the species. He doesn’t even want to kill them outright, he just wants to shake them violently by the scruff of the neck and maybe deliver a stern lecture about how _this is why we can’t have nice things._

_Then_ he’ll kill them. Obviously.

Still, it does him a favor in the long run. When she finally does succumb…and she’s going to…she’ll be astonished at how very pleasant the dark can be.

He shakes his head, looks at the datapad, and grins to himself again.

_And what a backdrop for it, too…_

It’s called Moraband. It’s a tomb world with a desert climate. It really is mostly uninhabited. There used to be a spaceport there, but it’s in ruins. There’s a handful of archaeologists, assuming they haven’t all hit a bad patch of Sith history and run mad and killed each other.

Uncle Luke was a Jedi down to his bones. If he thought something was dangerous, he ignored it in hopes that it would go away.

That’s why he’d had the Republic scrub relevant information from the nav-computers, made sure the name from the Clone War days stuck, so tourists didn’t go blundering in, turn up a bad holocron, go barking mad with ancient evils in their heads. Now it's just a world no one wants, no reason to go there, just a dull little world on the Outer Rim that nobody thinks about much.

Moraband.

Once known as Korriban.

Abandoned homeworld of the Sith.


	18. Chapter 18

Rey steps down on the surface of Moraband and feels the heat hit her like an oven blast.

Oh god, it’s good. She’d forgotten how cold she was all the time, how the chill had sunk into her bones. She had made a nest of blankets in her bunk on the _Falcon_ , but it was nothing compared to this heat that pours through her now.

Chewbacca looks at her from where he’s standing inside the _Falcon_ , then across the valley where the First Order shuttle stands like a gigantic winged predator.

“I know,” Rey says. “I know.” The Wookie has grave doubts about leaving her here. But even if Kylo Ren decides to clap her in irons…again…she beat him twice and they might as well make it three.

“Besides,” she says, shouldering her pack of supplies. “You’ve got to get back to the General and tell her what’s been going on.”

He roars subdued agreement and the hatch begins to close behind her. She doesn’t look back.

Rey isn’t stupid. She knows full well that Kylo Ren’s probably plotting something, even if it’s just to get laid. It’ll be just her luck, flying clear to the Outer Rim on the galaxy’s longest distance booty call.

(Rey is, in fact, incorrect. She is not even in the top hundred for sheer parsecs traveled in pursuit of sex, and that doesn’t include the various interstellar leviathan species who travel to distant nebulas to breed. Legend has it that Darth Revan once came back from the Unknown Region specifically to cruise a bar full of drunken Mandalorians. The current galaxy record holder is one Poe Dameron, last known to be working with the resistance, current whereabouts unknown.)

But Rey has her own agenda. Call it cowardice, call it…well, no, it’s cowardice, plain and simple. But if she’s here on Moraband, then Chewbacca is the one giving the report to General Organa. And Chewie’s report will say that someone murdered the diplomats, that the Resistance must assume they’ve been compromised, and that Rey is trying to draw the First Order off. Someone else will have to meet their allies, because they’re clearly in danger if Rey continues.

This is all true, so far as it goes, but Rey could never say it to the General, even over subspace. Chewie can and the hidden lie won’t come through. Probably.

She knows there will be more in his report. He’s seen her over the past few weeks. Her nerves are shot, she’s erratic, her temper’s shot all to shit. He’ll tell the general she’s fraying.

And that’s fine. Rey is past frayed. Rey is dangerous. Rey has done terrible things, and she can only think of one way to atone.

She’ll try to convince Kylo Ren to leave the First Order. Without a Force User at their helm, they will become vulnerable. She can try to Persuade the admirals to stand down, to abandon the effort, get to as many as she can before they bring her down. Drag the galaxy back to stalemate. Buy everyone some breathing room.

But if he can’t be persuaded to walk away, then Rey has a simpler mission.

She’ll kill him, even if it costs her life to do it.

* * *

  
Kylo Ren sees her picking her way across the valley floor and smiles. The Falcon took off a few minutes ago. He hadn’t been expecting that, but it does make his life easier.

She shades her eyes with her hand and clearly picks him out, standing on the cliff top. He’s wearing his mask and cloak. It’s good cloak weather. The updraft from the canyon wall sends it streaming off to his left.

Really, if you don’t occasionally pose dramatically in it, why even _own_ a cloak?

She pauses, looking down the length of the valley. Ruined buildings litter it, sand choking the doorways. Ancient structures of sandstone and adobe scar the cliffsides, left by the previous inhabitants.

This isn’t the Valley of Sith tombs. Kylo’s not completely lost to reason. This is a lesser outpost about eighty miles away, which probably housed students in the Academy a thousand years ago, give or take. Open yourself to the Force here and it’s quiet, a cool shadow of darkness, nothing more.

She begins to make her way into the valley and he walks down the cliff path to meet her.

When he pulls abreast of her, they both stop.

She’s yanked her hair back into tight braids again. There are deep blue circles under her eyes. She looks beautiful and fierce and tired.

He pulls his mask off and shakes his hair free.

She doesn’t immediately throw herself into his arms. He hadn’t really expected her to.

Still, a man can dream.

“Welcome to scenic Moraband,” he says, when it’s obvious she’s not going to speak first.

“Is there a water source?”

Of course that would be a desert dweller’s first concern. “Beyond that building there. There’s a courtyard with a spring.”

They don’t know how to walk together. It’s not a thing anyone usually thinks about, but the last time they went anywhere, it was as prisoner and captive. She won’t let him get behind her now, and he keeps pausing to let her go first—old Alderaanian courtesies, ingrained practically since the day he was born, even if he and Leia are the last practitioners alive. They end up stopping and starting a lot.

He offers her his hand over a rough patch of loose stone and she takes it grudgingly.

The physical contact shocks them both, even through the gloves. It feels like a kick to the chest, like the graze from a blaster. It rocks him back half a step, but he doesn’t let go.

Neither does she.

He grips her hand, more tightly than he was ever able to with the Force. She’s standing a little above him on the slope and he looks up into her eyes. They’re huge in her face and her throat works as she swallows.

He wants to sweep her up in his arms and pull her close, lock his mouth over hers, make love to her right there on the stone floor of the canyon, but he crushes that urge ruthlessly. _Go carefully_. He’s coaxed her all this way, laid his trap as carefully as any hunter, he can’t pounce too soon and drive her away.

She must pick up some of that because a shadow of fear crosses her face and he hates that, he’ll gut anything that frightens her, except it’s him or maybe herself, and so that would be extremely counterproductive.

“It will be all right,” he says softly, speaking to the alarm he sees in her eyes. 

She turns her face away, sighs, and he has the sense of a hurdle crossed. “Where are you staying?”

“On the shuttle. I’d offer you a berth there, but my guards are on it. Two of them.”

She narrows her eyes. “You brought _guards_.”

“I’ll kill them if you like. Or you can”

“What the _hell_ kind of offer is that?

“An honest one?” Damn, he should have realized she’d get weird about this. “They’re Persuaded to the gills right now. They won’t leave the shuttle. They’ll look right through you if they see you, which could be a problem if you’re trying to shower.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I thought you’d rather I didn’t kill them.”

“No,” she mutters. “No, I’m glad you didn’t.” She shifts her pack. “So what stops me from just killing you and taking your shuttle, then?”

He grins. Space, but she delights him. “Dead man’s switch,” he says, tapping his chest. “The shuttle won’t clear atmosphere without my biosign on it. After you borrowed Snoke’s shuttle, I took precautions.”

“So I should just turn you into a mindless husk, then?”

“I promised you that you could try to kill me. I didn’t promise to make it convenient.”

She shakes her head, but she’s smiling a little. It’s not exactly humor, more a wry awareness of how strange things have become between them. “All right. Show me this spring.”

 

* * *

 

It takes hours for Rey to clear a campsite. It’s not so much the labor but the looking. There’s at least twenty small rooms off the courtyard with the spring and she needs to check them all for structural soundness and local wildlife.

By the time she finds one she likes, it’s getting dark. The sun is going down in harsh, actinic colors, only slightly muted by the atmospheric dust.

Kylo Ren doesn’t pester her with questions. She appreciates that. He trusts she knows what she’s doing. He just sits on a rock in the ruined courtyard, waiting. Once she’s made her choice, he says “Tell me how to help.”

So, in the end, they really do make rocks float at each other. But it’s easy, much too easy, she directs the Force and he feeds her power. Their mental hands fit together as if they’ve worked together for years.

It’s far more seductive than it should be. This feels like partnership.

If only she’d found him sooner. If only Skywalker hadn’t had that terrible murderous moment. If only she’d found the words to pull him over to the light. If only…if…

In the end, she has a small room cleared, and an equally important spot, on the other side of the courtyard, to use as a privy. She rolls out her bedroll and builds her tiny fire. The desert is already growing cold as it gives up its daytime heat.

He stands beside the fire with her, orange light painted across his skin. Through the connection comes the knowledge that he is thinking very strongly about kissing her.

She turns a little toward him.

He reaches out and cups her jaw in his fingers. She feels suddenly dizzy.

_Only if you want me to,_ he says wordlessly. _I made you a promise._

She wants it. She wants it a great deal, and she knows she shouldn’t. Certainly her body wants it. There’s a pulse pounding someplace low and hot, as if they’re talking about a great deal more than a kiss.

But the word sticks in her throat. It’s as if this one syllable would be the final betrayal of the Resistance and Skywalker and her hopes of being a Jedi, and she can’t quite bring herself to say it out loud.

He searches her face, his thumb moving slowly over her lower lip, and then he nods, almost to himself.

“Tomorrow, then,” he says, and drops his hand.

 


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thirty thousand words. I think we’ve finally earned some smut, don’t you?

Rey can’t fall asleep.

She counts porgs. She tries to meditate. She tenses muscles and then relaxes them. She goes to the privy three times.

Sleep is not coming.

The wind is making a howling hiss through the cracks in the walls and something out in the desert has a sharp yipping cry and he almost kissed her and there’s a rock under her bedroll and they were so close and she should never have come here but oh god, what will it be like if…when…

_When_. Probably not _if_.

For no particular reason she thinks of his observation that preventing that sort of thing at the temple would have required shock collars.

Almost certainly when.

If he hadn’t brought guards, she suspects she’d be hiking up there right now.

This is a terrible idea.

Maybe it’ll be awful. That would be wonderful. She contemplates this hopefully. Maybe he’ll completely manhandle her, maybe it’ll take five minutes and leave her with a crick in her neck, and then she can kill him with a clear conscience.

If she’s maybe going to kill him, it doesn’t matter if she sleeps with him or not.

Hell, she knows he wants her. It’d be like granting a last request. He just won’t know it’s a last request.

Yes.

That.

Would that make it more or less okay?

The wind hisses more. Her fire’s banked down to coals, but she hears the occasional tiny pop of ash.

She still can’t sleep. It’s freezing in the desert at night and her blankets aren’t nearly thick enough.

She’s plotting to kill him. But she’s here to atone for her crimes. Can you even atone for a murder with another murder?

No, it’s not murder. It’s _Kylo Ren._ It’s not like she hasn’t tried to turn him. There comes a point where you’re just putting down a maddened animal.

…a maddened animal who very nearly kissed you…

…who killed every other Jedi in the galaxy…

…who saved your life…

…twice…

…whose power meshes with yours as if you were two halves of a whole…

…who didn’t turn away when you nearly fell to the Dark…

..who looks at you as if you were his last hope of heaven…

She grits her teeth and tries to count porgs again.

Finally Rey gives up and does what humans have done since time immemorial when they can’t sleep, slides her hand down under her waistband in hopes she’ll be able to rub one out and fall asleep afterwards.

Even that’s not working very well. She can’t even get a good rhythm going before the thing in the desert starts yipping and she gets distracted and then she scowls in the dark and tries to concentrate and things start to warm up and then she realizes that she’s started thinking about that memory that he showed her, him and that unknown Jedi student and no, _hell_ no, that feels like voyeurism and anyway how dare he, she hasn’t thrown the memory of her past lovers in his face...

...not that any of the three of them were something you could throw in anyone’s face...

…speaking of being manhandled...

…and the last one had screwed her out of a really promising haul and she’s still pissed about that even though it’s been over a year and this is absolutely not getting her any closer to an orgasm but now she’s half aroused and if she doesn’t finish somehow, she’s not going to get to sleep until daylight...

And a voice whispers in her head: _Let me help you with that._

 

  
Rey lets out a squeak of pure horror.

She tries to yank her fingers away, but there’s a gloved hand locked over hers, holding it in place, and if it’s not real, it’s a very good Force facsimile.

There’s a whisper of sensation over her nerves, a full body shiver, but all she can think is that she’s never been so embarrassed in her entire life, the blood under her skin feels hotter than the surface of the sun, he can’t possibly have caught her, except he has.

_Hmmm…?_ She feels a wash of coolness on her face, soothing the heat there, stroking her cheekbones. But he’s still touching her elsewhere, still got his hand over hers, and it must be the Force because she’s still fully clothed but that doesn’t seem to matter at the moment.

The touch begins at her collarbone, drifts downward between her breasts, across her ribs and over one hip. It feels like it’s been etched in fire across her skin.

_There?_ Lower, across to her inner thigh, moving slowly upward. _Or there?_

She could probably put a stop to this but here’s the problem with too much power and not enough precision, she blasts him away and she’ll take the roof and half the hillside out and he’s not even really there, so she’ll end up in a horribly embarrassed ball under a pile of rubble and he’ll maybe get a headache and she still won’t be able to get to sleep.

It occurs to her that she’s the only one who seems ashamed of anything right now.

Certainly he isn’t.

_Why would I be? And why would you?_

She can’t think of a good answer.

The hand over hers begins to move, stroking her with her own fingers, back and forth, right where it counts. _Don’t stop. It will take so much longer if you stop_.

Dear god.

Her body responds. Her body is absolutely on board for this. Her body is a goddamn traitor. She’ll…she’ll do something to it…break the planet, maybe…that’ll show it who’s boss…

Another shiver across her nerves. She loses the rhythm for a moment, but he’s keeping it for her and it’s starting to pick up urgency now and she can’t tell anymore where her heartbeat leaves off and his begins.

The bond between them snaps open and she braces herself to feel what he’s feeling—smugness, probably, or maybe he’ll gloat and if he does, she’ll just have to kill them both.

But what comes through hits her like the blast of heat from the desert and leaves her gasping. Not just lust. In fact, he’s concentrating on her so fiercely that his own pleasure’s barely even an afterthought in his mind. Whatever he’s feeling reminds her of the familiar rage they share. It’s love and hate, lust and loneliness, all tangled up together, and it wakes an answering emotion inside her.

It’s a fierce, hungry thing and for some reason there are words thrumming in her head, _through passion I gain strength_ and she can’t even remember what that’s from but that’s what this feels like, passion, and it roars through her veins and if it gains any more strength, she really might break the planet in half.

The touch glides higher and she spreads her legs apart. He doesn’t even have to ask. She feels a wash of satisfaction through the connection at that. She’s getting close to the edge and he’s not even using her to touch herself now, she’s doing it on her own, her breath catching in her throat.

Gloved fingertips glide over her flesh, slip just barely inside her. She gasps, trying to push against him, drive him deeper inside, but the sensation stays maddeningly distant. That far and no farther.

“Dammit,” she says hoarsely, the first word she’s spoken aloud since this began. She’s not going to beg. Another few minutes and she might have lost even that shred of pride, but it’s too late now, everything is happening at once, the first waves beginning to wrack her already, and she couldn’t stop it if she wanted to.

_Next time_ , he whispers and her nerve endings flood with sudden heat and she shouts something—his name maybe, or possibly she’s swearing, she doesn’t know, doesn’t even realize it’s happened until she hears the echoes ringing in the little stone room.

If he’d cut the connection at that moment, she would have made him wish Skywalker had finished the job all those years ago. But he doesn’t. He holds her while her body trembles with aftershocks, until it’s finally over. Her thigh muscles ache from the strain and she feels like she’s run a marathon. She felt less exhausted after the fight in the throne room.

She’s not sure if this was another battle, and if it was, whether she won or lost. She has the vague thought, again, that she wishes he could hold her more tightly, that the Force sensation was not so ethereal.

_Next time_ , he murmurs again, in her ear.

Arrogant bastard assumes there will _be_ a next time.

_Next time will be better_.

If it gets much better, she probably won’t survive the experience.

“You said you wouldn’t touch me,” she manages to say, not sure if she’s furious or sated or both together.

_And I haven’t. I’m nowhere near you right now._ A soft chuckle, and now at last she gets a trace of smugness across the connection. _Besides, Sith are notorious liars._

“I thought you weren’t a Sith.”

_If you insist on being a Jedi, what choice do I have?_

Yeah, she’s gonna have to kill him.

Tomorrow, though.

Because she’s finally warm, gloriously warm, and it looks like, at long last, she’s finally falling asleep.

 

* * *

 

 

Kylo Ren holds his scavenger girl until he is quite certain she’s sleeping before he finally releases the connection between them. He is fully aware, in the back of his mind, that he has probably made a serious mistake.

And he can’t bring himself to regret a single moment.

Well. Possibly the moment where he had completely failed to make it to the ‘fresher and was now hastily changing his sheets in the middle of the night, like a gawky adolescent. But he really hadn’t had a chance. The connection between them had been wide open and when she went over the edge, she took him with her.

Hence the need for clean sheets.

Sila would flip a table, of course. _What did I tell you?_

He hadn’t meant to do it. Well, he _had_ meant to do something like it, probably soon, but…well…he’d been nearly asleep himself but then he’d start to feel a vague mental itch coming from her direction and then he’d realized she was thinking about him and then he’d realized what she was _doing_ while she thought about him, and what the hell was he waiting for at that point, an engraved invitation?

It had not been subtle. It had certainly not been comforting.

It had been incredible.

She’d been so _responsive_. The sounds she’d made, the way she’d moved, the heat flooding through the connection…He has to stop and lean his forehead against the cool steel of the bulkhead for a minute. He’s completely spent, couldn’t do anything even if he wanted to, but the memory burns like a brand.

Also, she’s probably going to try to kill him. This is not surprising, but the confirmation is nice.

It doesn’t bother him. Hell, it’s part of the appeal. A heady mix of lust and attempted murder is practically foreplay if you’re a Sith (or close to one.) Her rage is positively intoxicating.

Maybe she’ll even succeed.

Maybe the black tide will claim them both. He doesn’t know, doesn’t care. All he wants to do now is fall down and sleep himself.

On (finally) clean sheets.


	20. Chapter 20

Rey gets up the next morning and makes instant caf over the fire.

It’s not good. Sure, they can travel between distant planets in the blink of an eye, but can anybody make instant caf that doesn’t taste like watered-down bantha dung?

Still, she needs the caffeine. She still hasn’t decided how she feels about last night.

She chews on a ration bar and broods.

Last night had felt amazing.

It had also felt dangerous.

She’d never felt anything to equal that. Three mediocre lovers on Jakku hadn’t prepared her, hadn’t even been forewarning. Here was a man who loves her, hates her, would learn what she wanted and do it ruthlessly. She could get lost in that rush of passion, addicted to it.

Already she wants more. She wants to knock him down, wipe the smug certainty out of his brain, make him feel as vulnerable as she does.

Which...ah, hmm. Her brain seems to have gotten stuck on the knocking-down part. Particularly if it could be accomplished without pants.

She glares into the fire and gnaws off another hunk of ration bar, washing it down with the lousy caf.

There’s a delicate brush across her mind, the Force equivalent of a polite knock.

She gets up, brushes the crumbs off, and steps outside.

He’s past the entrance to the courtyard, a courteous acknowledgment that this is now her territory, not his. He stands in the shadow of the canyon wall, cloak around his shoulders, cool and calm.

Rey is uncomfortably aware that her hair is ragged, she slept in her clothes, and she hasn’t had a chance for even a cat-bath in the spring.

He watches her approach with the faintest smile curving his lips and she wants very much to kiss him, so she does the next best thing and hauls back and socks him in the jaw.

 

* * *

  
Kylo Ren’s a big man and his scavenger’s a wiry little thing, so she has to reach up to punch him. He gets a half second of warning, just enough to dispel some of the impact with the Force before it lands. He suspects that the only reason he’s not spitting teeth.

“Good morning,” he says, rubbing the side of his face. He tastes blood. Maybe he should have listened to Sila after all. Who knew she’d have a right hook like that, though?

“You bastard! How _dare_ you?”

“How dare I what?”

“How dare you—last night— _you know what you did!”_

“Made you scream?”

Her glare could eat through stone. She swings at him again and he manages to block, tries to wave his left hand—“You will stop punching me!”—feels the Persuasion skid off her shields, why the _hell_ had he taught her to shield, that had been incredibly counter-productive—and gives up. Physical force it is.

He’s got height, weight, and reach. Even that might not be enough if she was truly determined, but she doesn’t seem to want him dead—at least, not yet.

He grabs her arm, pulls her in close, spins them both so that her back slams into the stone wall of the canyon and he’s got her pinned against his chest. He’s stronger than she is unless she decides to use the Force, and then things will get interesting.

_More_ interesting.

Because as soon as they’re pressed together, the connection doesn’t so much open as roar to life.

He braces himself for the heightened awareness, but something else happens. It’s as if someone else is reaching into the connection from outside, turning it strangely, so that he’s plunged not into his scavenger’s thoughts, but her memories.

Visions skid through his head that aren’t his own. His own face, a demon’s mask lit by red, the snow trampled and bloody underfoot. His gloved hand against her cheek, the fine seam on the leather against her skin. He sees himself in the throne room and half of his mind is consumed with Rey’s terror as she waits to be struck down and the other is thinking that this is the second time in a week he’s looked up at himself in someone shorter’s memory and he’s going to get an existential crick in his neck if this keeps up.

What is happening? Who’s doing this?

The images flicker faster now and he sees himself as she sees him, fighting her, saving her, half monster and half guardian angel. Space only knows what she’s seeing in return. He’s better guarded than she is—probably—but if he isn’t careful, he’ll end up giving up every secret he has.

It takes an extraordinary effort of will, but he tears himself free.

The visions fade. He has a strange sense of something noticing them, some vast, still thing, so large he can’t make out the edges of it.

Then that, too, fades. He’s not sure if it was even really there to begin with. Maybe he’s hallucinated the whole thing. Maybe Korriban’s getting on his nerves, making him jump at shadows.

When he can focus on the real world again, Rey’s staring up at him, her eyes huge.

“What was that?”

He shakes his head. “Something odd. Something about this place, maybe. I don’t know.”

_What did she see?_

“You were on fire,” she says, sounding baffled. “Everything burned.”

He knows that one immediately.

_Shit. One of those._

“It was nothing,” he said. “A mistake.”

Her eyes search his face. “You thought you were dying.”

The very first one, then, before he got used to the pain. Well. Not the worst thing she could see. “I didn’t die. Obviously.”

He realizes he’s still got her trapped against the stone and he steps back, meaning to set her free, but she grabs at his upper arms and he realizes he’s the only thing holding her upright. The memories took her harder than him—fewer shields, or maybe she just hit much worse ones.

Probably the latter. The burning hadn’t been good.

“Are you all right?”

“What was that? Don’t tell me it was nothing. It happened more than once.”

He can’t very well drop her on the canyon floor. He leans down, scoops her up in his arms. She’s made of whipcord and wire and not much else. He can practically hear Sila yelling at him to feed her.

“What the hell are you doing!?”

“Carrying you.” He threads his way between the rocks, back to the courtyard and the fire.

“I can walk.”

“And yet here we are.”

She puts his arms around her neck for balance, but she doesn’t look happy about it. “Don’t change the subject. How did you set yourself on fire more than once?”

Gahh, she’s really not going to let this go, is she?

“Price of failure,” he said shortly. “Aren’t you worried about what I saw?”

That clearly hadn’t occurred to her. Her fingers tighten on his cloak. “What did you see?”

He sets her down on the stones edging the spring, sitting down beside her so that they’re still touching, hip to hip. She doesn’t protest. “The throne room. You were waiting for me to cut off your head.” Kylo pauses, reluctant to add the rest. “You were frightened of me.”

He’s starting to hate that.

“You told me once that I _should_ be frightened of you.”

“I lied,” he says, cupping her face with both hands. He could kiss her right now and she’d enjoy it—he’d make damn sure she’d enjoy it—but he made a promise and even if Sith are notorious liars, some part of him wants to keep the letter of that promise. He finds her hatred exhilarating but her fear claws at him. She can kill him, curse him, run him through with a lightsaber, and he may yet end up killing her, but he never wants her to be afraid of him again.

_Only if you want me to_ , he tells her.

She clenches her hand in his hair and pulls his mouth down to hers.

He’s surprised for rather longer than he should be, then elated, and then he can’t seem to think at all. Her mouth is soft and cool under his. She tastes like water in a dry land, like all the reasons young Sith are warned away from Jedi.

He should have done this the first day they met. The first hour. Which…okay, yes, torture room, might have been taken the wrong way, that’s a logical reason not to. Still. Dear god, he’s wasted so much time.

The kiss deepens until he nearly drowns, until he has to pull back. It’s starting to bleed over the connection and her pleasure feeds back on his and then he can taste his blood in her mouth, from where she punched him…was it only ten minutes ago?

Okay, they really have to figure out some way to control the bond. Sensing your partner’s pleasure is one thing, but much more of this and he’s going to feel like he’s kissing himself and that’s too weird even for him.

They break apart. He can’t hear anything over the pounding in his ears. Is that her heartbeat? His? Does it matter? He’s panting for air like a dog. So is she.

They sit on the edge of the spring, an arms-length apart, not quite touching each other, while they both try to catch their breath.

“So that’s good,” he finally says, which is possibly the single most inane thing he’s ever said in his life.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, that’s…uh. Yeah.”

He can’t help it. He starts to laugh.

She elbows him in the ribs but he still can’t stop and then she starts and pretty soon the two most powerful Force users in the galaxy, champions of the Light and Dark, etc etc, are sitting in a ruined courtyard on a dead planet, laughing until neither one of them can stand up.

 

 

 


	21. Chapter 21

Eventually, of course, they stop laughing. Kylo Ren watches a slow realization pass across Rey’s face, watches her go still.

“Ah, god,” she says finally. She wraps her arms around herself. “What am I doing?”

“Laughing,” he says. “I hear it’s good for the soul. Not that _I’d_ know.”

She shakes her head. “I came here to atone,” she says. “How can I be laughing like this? I’ve killed…”

“Yes, yes.” He leans his head back against the stones. “You’re history’s greatest monster.”

He can feel her eyes boring into the side of his head. “You don’t understand.”

“The hell I don’t.” He tilts his head to one side, meets her gaze. “My grandfather blew up a planet. Also a lot of other people, but the planet _was_ pretty spectacular. And yet he was redeemed.”

“There was still good in him!”

Kylo Ren folds his arms. “You tried to redeem _me.”_

“Everybody makes mistakes,” she mutters ungraciously.

He snorts. “And here _you’ve_ killed two not-terribly-good people and you're sure that your crimes are so great that you’re about to start picking out black robes and itching for a double-ended lightsaber. And they say _I’m_ arrogant.”

He feels her start to get angry and has to hide a smile. Then another thought occurs to him--“Uh, if you’re getting mad, can you not punch me again? I don’t mind stabbing you but punching women feels _extremely_ weird.”

“Would a Sith worry about that?”

“If they'd been raised by my mother, damn straight they would.”

She smiles briefly at that, but it fades. She gnaws on her lower lip. “Anger _is_ of the dark, though. And I’m so angry.”

“That will pass. I told you.”

“No.” She clasps her hands together. “No, I don’t think it will.”

He frowns, sitting up. “What?”

But he looks, really looks, and she’s not wrong. The black tide is in her too. She looks like a pillar of light above a dark sea, and the base of the crystal is no longer white but stained red as blood.

It’s beautiful, but he can see why she’s worried.

“It isn’t going anywhere,” she says. “I’ve always been angry. I was angry with you in the forest. This rage is…it’s mine. You didn’t give me anything I didn’t already have. You just woke it up and gave it power.”

She stares into the distance, looking noble and tormented and sad, which, since time immemorial, has been one of things that Jedi frequently do that drives Sith absolutely batshit.

He tries to think of something really cutting to say, but the way that loose bits of hair are curving around her neck keep distracting him. He suspects that the skin there is extremely soft. He wants to set his teeth against it, just enough to make her gasp and stop staring into the distance like a goddamn statue.

“How do you keep it on a leash?” she asks.

“Keep what?”

“The beast.” 

He’s puzzled for an instant, then gets her meaning. What he thinks of as the black tide, she thinks of as a beast on a chain. He finds this rather amusing, picturing himself strolling along with some hulking monster walking at heel—a rancor, maybe, or a krayt dragon. Very stylish. He’ll get the monster a matching cloak.

“I make a bargain with it,” he says.

 “A bargain?”

“It knows that if it obeys me now, I will let it off the leash soon enough.”

She recoils. He gets a flash of a concrete bunker, a lightsaber whine. “I can’t do that!” 

“And that’s why it won’t stay on a leash for you.” Kylo closes his eyes and leans back. The air is beginning to warm as the sun rises. He is feeling peaceful again. He is comfortable and the air is warm and he is absolutely going to get laid, probably soon.

He hears cloth rustling as she moves.

“What was that burning I picked up from you earlier?” 

_Dammit._

_Peace is a lie,_ the Sith say, and apparently they’re right. He opens his eyes again, gazes skyward. “I told you, price of failure. Nothing to worry about.”

She leans over so that her face fills his field of vision. “You know I’m going to find out eventually. Either you’ll tell me or this thing between us will show me or…”

He sighs heavily, mostly because she’s right. _Fine. Get it over with._ He bites the fingertip of his glove in his teeth and yanks it loose, then reaches over and grabs her forearm with his bare hand. He’s not gentle about it, but it’s not a gentle memory. 

Fire roars down every nerve ending, his hands, his face, every inch of his skin. He hears his own voice, a choked off scream, and then there’s only an eternity of pain, everything on fire, until things begin to go black.

A long time later, the pain doesn’t so much stop as ratchet downward. Shocks still hit him, farther and farther apart. His fingers convulse with every one, nails scraping on the deckplates.

There’s pressure on his neck and he’s rolled onto his side. Snoke has one slippered foot on his throat and is gazing down at him with an oddly benign expression.

“Failure has a price, apprentice,” says the Supreme Leader gently. “Someone must always pay that price. You know that, don’t you?”

He knows. His breath is a thin wheeze. Even his lungs feel seared, but none of it’s real.

His body isn’t so sure. The clammy sweat of shock is trickling down his back and his heartbeat is a thin, swift thread.

Snoke nods, satisfied. He steps back. Two of the Knights of Ren come forward and pick him up, both of them masked, and in some small part of his mind he’s grateful for the masks, if they’re masked, Snoke can’t see their expressions and he knows that they don’t hide their expressions well and he can’t take a punishment like this for each of them.

They drag him away, through the door, and Ban Kalla says “We’re taking you to the medbay,” and he tries to walk, staggering drunkenly between his Knights and that’s fine, it’s over, he just has to get to the medbay…

The memory fades. Kylo has the sense, again, of an observer watching the memory through the connection, as if it cannot read their minds but only the channel between them.

His scavenger’s staring at him, her mouth a grim line. “What was _that?”_

“I’m not sure,” he admits, turning his head. “I feel like something’s out there, but I can’t quite find it. I wonder if there’s some predator out in the dunes that’s picking things up…”

“What?”

“What what?”

“I meant _that.”_

He blinks at her. One of them is going to need to start using nouns. “Err…What are _you_ talking about?”

“The burning! The memory! What Snoke did to you!”

“Oh _, that.”_ He shrugs uncomfortably. “I mean, these things happen.”

She’s looking at him with pity in her eyes, and that was the one thing he was really trying to avoid. He likes her pity even less than her fear. Pity is diametrically opposed to confidence. Sila would put her head in her hands and then stomp off to bake the muffins of failure.

“Look, I chopped him in half. I really think I came out on top.” He leans back against the edge of the spring again, eyes closed, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever’s been spying on them, but it’s long gone. 

He can feel her reshuffling what she knows about him, sorting through this new information, and stifles another sigh. “Before you start casting me as the hero of a tragedy, this was long after I burned the training temple. I wasn’t tortured over to the dark side.”

She’s silent for a minute. “Is anyone?” 

“Oh, plenty of people were. Torturing Jedi was a Sith hobby for awhile.” He slides his glove back on. “Doesn’t work in the long term, though. You don’t get a new Sith, you just get a really broken Jedi. And no, before you ask, I don’t know from personal experience.”

In the end, of course, there proved to be much better methods to use on Jedi. But now's not the time for that discussion.

He thinks he’s distracted her and the moment’s passed, until she says “You took the punishment to save someone else.”

_Shit._

“I did nothing of the sort,” he says, through his teeth. “One of the Knights failed. As his commander, I was responsible.” 

“But—“

“Loyalty goes both ways,” he says, pushing himself to his feet. “He was one of mine.”

She folds her arms in front of her chest. She looks skeptical. He doesn’t bother to tell her that she’s his now, too. She’d probably take it the wrong way.

“Come up to the shuttle later,” he says, over his shoulder, as he leaves the courtyard. “When you’re ready. There’s a place I want to show you.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Kylo Ren finally gets laid. Obviously there is smut. And a bit of a diabolical plan, but mostly smut.

In the end, it takes Rey an hour to prepare. Part of that was taking a quick bath in the run-off from the spring. Part of it was spent sitting cross-legged, trying to breathe, trying to center herself again.

She sits on the stone, slowly warming in the sun. Her drying hair makes a frizzy halo around her face. She opens her senses to the planet, very carefully, ready to slam them back up at an instant’s notice.

Moraband was dark and quiet. A tomb world, she remembers. Maybe they’re all like that, she doesn’t know. The life here is thin, not heavily layered, a few scattered, sturdy species that can live on anything. Far out in the silent dunes, she can sense the minds of larger things, great slow predators, the kind that wait for a hundred years between meals.

There are clots of shadow in the world, places of the Dark. She avoids them with her mind. One long, jagged one runs like a knife-wound to the east. It’s much darker than the one on Ach-To. Rey wonders what monstrous thing happened there…perhaps whatever made Moraband a tomb world in the first place. Of course a planet would remember that.

She sighs, closing up her shields again. She doesn’t want to poke the planet. The farmworld had been much more active, much more awake, but it had also been a great deal smaller.

Besides, she has other things to worry about.

She is going to go meet Kylo Ren again. They are going to go somewhere…whatever place he wanted to show her. And then, she’s pretty sure, he’s going to kiss her and then she’s either going to knock his feet out from under him or he’s going to knock her feet out from under her and Force only knows if either of them are going to survive the experience.

She braids her hair back up with unsteady fingers.

Afterwards…afterwards she’ll ask him to leave the First Order. Hell, maybe she’ll ask him to come with her. “Join me…and we’ll rule absolutely nothing together.”

She means it as a joke, but the idea suddenly seizes her heart and won’t let go. Could that work?

Rey sighs. Probably not. He won’t come back to the Light. In some ways, maybe Vader was easier. Vader’s evil was pure and hard and clearcut. Kylo Ren’s nothing like that. He’s a cracked crystal, too many conflicting forces in one place—loyalty and rage, humor and despair, a man who would take a bitter punishment for a friend (the memory of the burning pain makes her wince) and then plot to blow up a star system full of innocents. A man who would save her life and hold her while she cried and kill his own father on the orders of a man he loathed.

It is probably easier to return to the Light if you know why you’ve turned to the Dark in the first place.

Kylo Ren throws her off center, makes her feel as if she’s completely out of balance, as if they’re binary stars rotating around a point that’s inside neither one. Probably she should just go out in the desert and wait until Chewie finally comes back to pick her up.

And yet…and yet…

She doesn’t know what she _should_ do, she only knows what she’s _going_ to do.

She stands up, kicks the dust of the courtyard off her boots, and walks up to the shuttle.

 

* * *

 

 

Kylo Ren leans against one of the landing struts of the shuttle, sipping caf, watching his scavenger approach.

God, she’s beautiful.

The darkness walks a little behind her and he can understand why she sees it as a beast. She’s a glow of white and scarlet fire and the shadow only makes the fire brighter. 

He loves the shadow as much as the fire. More. The shadow he understands.

She uses her staff as a walking stick, coming up the path to the shuttle. He can see that she doesn’t much care for the shuttle, hunching away from it involuntarily, as if it’s a predator.

She steps grimly into the shadow of the shuttle and he silently hands her a mug.

She looks briefly confused, sniffs, and realizes it’s caf. _Decent_ caf. An expression of uncomplicated joy spreads over her face.

“How did you _know?_

“I could have heard you muttering about the instant stuff from a star system away.” He watches her drink, feeling a not entirely innocent pleasure at the sight.

They stand in silence, drinking, watching the wind ruffle the sand along the edge of the canyon. It is a lonely sight, but for a moment, neither of them are feeling lonely.

“So where is this place?” asks Rey, when she finally finishes the caf. She sets the mug down on beside the landing strut.

“About a mile away. Not a bad walk.” He points.

“You’re not really dressed for it.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’re wearing black in a desert.”

Kylo rolls his eyes, holds out one hand. She takes it and blinks. The leather of the glove is cool, almost cold.

“How are you doing that?”

“The Force,” he says, as they begin to walk. “It’s simple. The Force is energy, right? And heat is the most basic form of energy. Give the air a little energy, it warms. Take it away, it gets cold.”

He can feel her walking beside him, experimenting tentatively. A wash of coolness touches him as she pulls energy from the air.

“Put up a second set of shields a little farther out,” he suggests. “Otherwise you’re trying to air-condition the entire planet.”

“This seems very frivolous,” she mutters, trying to work out the mechanics. “It seems like you should only use the Force for things that matter.”

“Not dying of heat stroke matters to _me.”_

“You could dress differently.”

“I like cloaks.”

“Why?”

“I enjoy twirling them and shouting _Muahahaha_ at my enemies.”

She is clearly trying not to smile. Kylo will take that as a victory.

They walk in companionable silence until they finally reach the last rise. “Down here,” he says, gesturing to a set of rough-hewn steps that take them into a hidden canyon. There’s a doorway cut into the cliffside, almost perfectly square, as if two people were meant to walk through abreast.

She glances at him, puzzled, and he takes her hand so that they both walk through the door together.

It is a nearly round room, dozens of paces across. It rises thirty feet overhead, cut with skylights that cast white beams of light through the shadow. The floor is stone, but sand has blown in and drifted into the corners.

The Force here is a quiet dark music. He hears it in his head, scattered notes that sometimes join together into a greater whole. It’s soft and deep and strangely soothing against his heart.

It’s meant to be seductive. That’s the point of this place after all.

He pulls his cloak off and spreads it over the ground.

She turns to look at him, a puzzled crease forming between her eyes. “What is this place?”

“An old place,” he answers. Which is true.

What he does not tell her is that they are standing here now because the Twi’lek Knight Ban Kalla stayed up for several nights running doing frantic research on Korriban, which was sent on subspace to Kylo Ren, followed by a truly nightmarish sequence of codes telling him what bit of the research to look at, and that Kylo then scoured the planet until he located this room and set down nearby, less than a day before the _Millenium Falcon_ arrived.

It had been a slightly tense few days, but worth it.

This beautiful, calm place, where the Force slowly sings to the nerves and the skin, was a place where Jedi were turned a thousand years ago.

It was a female Sith Lord, many centuries past, who decided that torturing Jedi to turn them was a very stupid thing to do. The Force is about balance. Therefore if you turn a Jedi to the Dark, you will ultimately only strengthen your enemy as the Force rushes to balance things out by raising some new champion.

How much more efficient, she decided, not to turn Jedi but to _tame_ them. A creature of the Light who nevertheless answers to you, a champion of all that is good who walks docilely at your heel. And thus the balance is kept, provided that you are clever and do not expect your pet Jedi to do anything particularly egregious, like blow up a planet or kick puppies.

Her method depended on the great attraction between Sith and Jedi, and it requires patience and it helps if they’re in love with you. They yearn to turn you. They live on the hope of bringing you to the light, and by that chain, she said, you hold them.

Some Sith embraced it. Most didn’t have the temperament for it.

The Jedi Order, at the time, feared it like they feared nothing else.

What happened to that Sith and her Jedi lover (you know there was one, of course) is lost to history, but it worked well enough that this place still remembers. The music is very soft and not complete, but it is there.

Kylo Ren wants his scavenger, wants her as he’s never wanted anything in his life, but he knows that he cannot have her and still remain as he is. Unless he is clever. Unless he can turn the power of this place to his own ends.

She is looking around, a faint smile on her face. “This is beautiful,” she says.

“I thought so.” His heart is beginning to pound in his chest. He lets her feel the edge of that, of the anticipation twisting inside him, and feels the echo of it from her. She’s nervous. He is too, but he tries not to let that show through.

Kylo Ren takes her hand and pulls her against him and this time he kisses her.

 

* * *

 

 

It starts out sweet and tender and lasts that way for approximately a tenth of a second and then she’s pressing against him and he’s picking her up in his arms and carrying her to where he spread out his cloak. (This is the other reason he likes cloaks.) They both know what’s going to happen next and they both had opportunities to turn aside and neither one did.

He’s rock hard and when she brushes her hand across the front of his pants he damn near jumps out of his skin.

She laughs at that, which means that he really has no choice but to drag her down and kiss her again, and then there’s a great deal of fumbling with clothes and he could probably use the Force to make this easier but he’d much rather use it to run ghostly fingers down her spine and make her cry out in surprise.

They’re both so keyed up now that it doesn’t take long. He leaves his gloves on. Frankly, she’s lucky he gets his boots off at this point, he’s too eager to touch her and then she runs her hands over his chest and down—a long way down—and he gasps and it’s her turn to look smug.

He’d like nothing more than for her to continue what she’s doing, but if she keeps stroking him like that, it’ll be over very quickly indeed. He pulls her hands away and sets out, quite ruthlessly, to touch her in all the ways that made her scream the night before.

Leather against skin is more intense than any ghostly touch could be, but he lets the Force trail fire after his fingertips anyway, working his way down her body. She squirms and pants and he feels her sudden flush of embarrassment and wordlessly sweeps it aside.

_Don’t stop. How else will I know what you like?_

Which is not entirely true, of course. He can feel what she likes, even when she’s so focused on the sensation she doesn’t remember to breathe. He strokes one hand slowly over her hot, swollen flesh, lets the other trail down her thighs, while the connection between them glitters with pinpoint flashes of sensation.

She bucks her hips against him, asking wordlessly for more, and this time he gives it to her. Two gloved fingers, the leather already slick, and she’s so wet they glide in deep. She’s close to the edge already, he can feel it. When he pulls his fingers out again, she throws her head back and gasps his name.

Kylo. Not Ben. Not any foolishness like that. They both know who they are.

He slips his fingers in and out in short, quick strokes, until she lets out a single, agonized cry and grabs his wrist. He stops, still inside her, feeling the spasms shake her, feeling the pleasure rock the connection between them, and also feeling ungodly smug.

He keeps that off the connection, though. Among other things.

He holds her while she catches her breath. She puts her face against his shoulder, gasping for air. He has to take his weight on his forearms so he doesn’t crush her, but it doesn’t take long. Through the connection, he can feel that she wants him inside her, very much.

Then it’s his turn.

He slides inside her, slowly, and she cries out. It’s not all pleasure. It’s been a long time and he’s not small. A flare of pain comes across the connection and he feels it as keenly as she does. He knows he should stop, let her get used to the sensation, but he keeps going, opening her up, making her take every inch, even though it hurts them both. The pain is part of it. You bed a Sith, it’s going to happen.

She whimpers under him and he brushes the hair away from her face and kisses her again, pressing even deeper. She’s tight and hot and slick around him and he gives her that pleasure back across the connection, because it’s only fair, lets her taste the hunger he’s been hiding for months now, a hunger that’s only finally being fed.

When she cries out this time, it isn’t from pain.

It would be easy now to start driving into her and not stop. End it quickly and shatteringly for both of them. But he goes as slowly as he can, savoring the way her small body feels under his, her breasts pressed against his chest, listening to the dark music of the Force working in the background.

He loves this. He loves _her_. And maybe he’s not quick enough to keep that from the connection or maybe he didn’t really try, because he feels her stiffen with surprise in his arms and then she wraps her legs around him and takes him deep and he can’t hold back any longer.

“Rey,” he says hoarsely, and he never says her name out loud, he rarely even thinks it, but this time he does and he can feel her delight through the connection and then he shouts as he buries himself into her heat and pleasure crashes down like a wave over them both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea if any Sith ever did this in canon, but it made sense to me.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have I mentioned this is a deeply unhealthy relationship? Just so we’re all very clear...

Rey lies curled up beside Kylo Ren with her head on his chest, feeling sore and sated and utterly content. 

He has his arm around her, one hand curved possessively over her hip. Though the connection is only a soft murmur between them, that’s the emotion that comes through most strongly--possessiveness.

_Mine._

It was so novel a feeling. She came from nowhere. She had been traded away. To have someone holding her in his arms, feeling so strongly that she was his and he would fight the entire galaxy to claim her…

“The _entire_ galaxy?” she says aloud, amused.

“All of it,” he says. His eyes are still closed, his head tilted back. “Twice. Possibly three times.”

“I can’t imagine you’d have to.”

“Good.” His arms tighten around her. “It would really cut into my free time.”

“And what are you planning on doing with all that free time?”

“I have some ideas, but you’ll have to give me a few minutes to recover.” He opens his eyes, smiles down at her.

She chuckles and curls against him, soaking up his body heat. The strange round room is almost cool despite the desert heat. Thick walls, she imagines, and sturdy construction. Lots of desert buildings were like that.

The Force here is very peaceful, full of quiet music. She could almost fall asleep like this. She hasn’t slept well for days, trying to keep the beast contained, trying to figure out what to do next. But now the beast is quiet and she feels safe and warm and…yes, even loved.

Rey knows that he’s keeping secrets from her still. Parts of him are closed off, and maybe always will be. But for a few moments, through the connection between them, she’d felt such a wave of passion from him that it made her heart ache. If it's not love, it's as close as he's capable of getting.

Possibly that's enough.

She closes her eyes, listening to Kylo’s heartbeat mingled with the soft, distant music, while he strokes his free hand over her hair.

_You’re mine…only mine…and I’m yours…and by that chain, you will hold them…_

“…mmm?” She thought she’d heard something odd at the end.

“Nothing,” he says, pressing his lips against her forehead. “Nothing at all.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

The watcher’s back.

It takes Kylo Ren a few minutes to realize it. He’s got Rey in his arms and he is basking in a warm, sleepy afterglow. She’s already two-thirds asleep herself, which is fine. He feels a certain pride at having worn her out, and anyway, sleeping minds are easier to influence.

 _You're mine,_ he whispers into her half-dreaming mind. _I will never let you go._

She feels very small against him, fine-boned, delicate. He has a strong urge to wrap her in a protective cocoon of Force and lightsaber and keep the rest of the world at bay. Which is ironic, given that there’s still a not-insignificant chance he’ll have to kill her, a fact which doesn’t particularly bother him.

_Well, that’s Sith love for you. Nobody gets to hurt you but me._

He glances down along their bodies, sees that he’s left a mark on her shoulder. He hardly remembers doing it, but there it is, red against the pale skin. Not quite so impressive as his scar, perhaps, but he has no desire to mar her permanently, only to stake out his territory so the rest of the galaxy knows to keep their hands off.

He hears the dark music around them. He can feel it soothing his nerves and that amuses him, given why he brought his scavenger girl here in the first place.

But it’s very peaceful, even knowing that, and he’s half-asleep himself before he feels the watcher. It feels much closer. 

He sits up, pulling Rey into his lap, wrapping a protective arm around her. She makes a sleepy sound of discontent, face against his neck.

Kylo wants to shout, ask if someone is there, demand that they show themselves, but he doesn’t want to startle her. And it might give away that he’s aware of the…creature? Person? He still can’t get a sense of it. He feels like he ought to be able to put his finger on what it reminds him of, but the memory eludes him.

Given where they are, _dead Sith Lord_ is obviously the most likely. Which, uh…yeah, okay, that would be inconvenient. He’s been _assured_ that there’s no holocrons floating around unaccounted for, all the Darths are safely dead and even their ghosts reduced to mental ashes. 

Snoke assured him. 

Snoke…who, it occurs to Kylo belatedly, may not have been one hundred percent honest with his apprentice on this topic.

 _Oh. Hmm._

Possibly Korriban was not the most sensible romantic destination.

Still, Ban Kalla would have mentioned something if there was one just hanging around, and anyway, this place is _working._ He can _feel_ it working. The music’s in the back of his brain, poking things, whispering away. He’s got an eye on it, but he can only imagine what it’s doing to Rey.

The watcher barely feels like a person anyway. It’s gigantic, not tightly focused. It’s just…there. And aware. And apparently just watched the two of them screwing each other’s brains out.

Well, he hopes it got a damn good show.

It’s already starting to fade away, as if whatever was watching has turned its attention elsewhere.

His scavenger stirs against his chest. “Kylo? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Thought I heard something, that’s all.” He was hoping for at least one more round here, in the room where Jedi were turned. Now that he’s taken the edge off, he can go a little slower, take his time, learn every inch of her body. Show her what he likes too, for that matter. He'll have to keep one mental eye out for the watcher, but that's fine. He learned a long time ago to always watch his back, even in the most intimate moments.

Especially in the most intimate ones.

She lifts her head, eyes narrowing. “Do we need to get dressed?”

“Don’t you dare,” he says, and kisses her again.


	24. Chapter 24

 It was nearly evening by the time they returned to the shuttle. The desert was beginning to cool, but neither of them noticed. They walked hand in hand together when they could, and when they had to break apart and walk single-file, she went first.

At the shuttle things became awkward. They looked at each other, then up at the shuttle.

Finally Rey says “I…well. I guess I’d better…”

Kylo Ren nods. “I’d invite you back to my place, but…uh…mind-controlled guards. You know.”

“Yeah, that does put a damper on things.”

He pulls her close and she expected another soul-searing kiss, but he only kisses her forehead. She felt fabric gathered at her shoulders and realized he’d wrapped his cloak around her.

It is on the lonely walk to her camp that Rey’s contentment began to seep away. She was alone in the desert a thousand lightyears from anywhere and she was…she had…

Dear god, what had she just done?

Stupid question. She knows exactly what she’s done. Her thighs are still sticky from it. She’d let him…

Rey snorts. _Let_ him. She hadn’t _let_ him do anything. She’d wanted it as badly as he did, shameless as a bitch in heat.

She pulls the cloak tighter. It smelled like him, which was…well, military issue soap and military issue detergent, mostly, everybody bought in bulk from the same suppliers, regardless of what side you were on. And a hint of something burnt, like smoke and ash, and the scent of his skin.

Her enemy’s skin.

Her enemy.

She had wanted him, and she’d had him and she still wants him. She is…

... _in love with_ …

…drawn to him. Helplessly. Hopelessly. She knows she can’t turn him…dammit, she knows. Surely she knows. He’s of the Dark, completely, willingly.

She knows better, and yet she can’t believe, in the depths of her soul, that someone truly given to evil would hold her the way he had. Evil people might make love, but surely they’d never hold someone else while they sobbed their hearts out.

Surely.

She can’t turn him.

But it’s in her head now, a thin crack in the bedrock of her belief, that maybe it’s not over yet. Maybe she still has a chance. Maybe together, they could be something more.

The Force is still full of that strange, elusive music. She shakes her head, trying to clear it. The wind whips at the cloak and she imagines it’s probably looking quite dramatic right now, flared out behind her, and she has to laugh.

Well. No wonder he likes them.

Her campfire’s gone cold. She builds it up again, then goes to the spring and cleans herself off. The water’s ice cold against her skin.

Another half of a ration bar and Rey sits back, the cloak still around her shoulders. She runs her fingers over the fabric.

Even if she left right now, if Chewbacca showed up in the _Falcon_ to take her away, she couldn’t keep it. She’d get to the Resistance and they’d want to know if she’d killed him. Tell them it’s a loan and pretty soon she’s getting suspicious looks across the hangar deck and next thing you know, she’s being treated as a hopelessly compromised asset.

“Which, let’s face it, I am,” she says to the fire.

Rey can tell herself all she wants that she’s trying to turn him or hoping to change him or anything else, but the fact is, she’s sleeping with the enemy. If she was dangerous to the Resistance before, how much more dangerous is she now? She’s violent, unstable, and if the head of the First Order snaps his fingers, there’s a non-zero chance she’ll come running.

She wonders if she can even bring herself to kill him.

A few minutes later, sunk deep in thought, she feels a soft brush across her mind.

She sits up.

Kylo Ren comes through the entrance to the courtyard. He’s got an oversized pack, First Order charcoal grey, slung behind him. She recognizes a roll of blankets.

She blinks up at him.

“Only if you want me to,” he says aloud. And then, wordlessly, _But I didn’t want to sleep alone again._

There was a point where she could have turned back. She doesn’t know what that point was, but surely there was one. But it’s long gone now, and Rey stands up and pulls him to her and says “Neither do I.”

 

* * *

 

It’s not as easy to get the bed sorted out as it could be. Rey sleeps in a mouse nest of blankets and Kylo Ren lays things out with military precision, corners tucked and folded over. But they manage a compromise and then he makes it all moot by pulling her into his arms and tangling the blankets anyway.

He hadn’t really thought about what to do tonight, but when he felt her unease through the connection, he’d known it was no time to leave her alone. Nights are too long. He remembers that from the days after the Temple.

_Go back to that awful place and remember what you needed…_

Well, Sila’s advice has gotten him this far.

The knot of unease in his scavenger’s chest isn’t loosening. He lays his palm between her breasts and half-imagines he can feel the turmoil there through his skin.

“What’s wrong?”

She starts to shake her head and he taps his finger against her collarbone. _You don’t have to lie. I can feel you. Tell me._

“I’m afraid,” she admits.

_Of what?_

“This. You. What happens next.”

It’s too dark to see, but he can hear tears in her voice, hears the thread of her thoughts—what will come of this? What now? She can’t bear the thought of leaving him, but she has too many people to protect, everyone on the other side, and how can she save them from him? How can she save _him_?

“I can’t figure out a way,” she admits. “I keep trying, but there isn’t one.”

 _There is always a way. I promise, we’ll find one_.

“You want to kill my friends!”

“Not particularly,” he says out loud. “One of your friends is my mother.”

“You shot out the bridge!”

“I didn’t. The two pilots with me did. Incidentally, they’re both dead.” (This is true. Identical asphyxiations in the middle of the night, as if someone had strangled them, but with no marks. Everybody knows who did it. Kylo Ren is fully capable of leading an attack and then killing the people who carry it out. Being a Sith means embracing a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.)

“You murdered Han!”

It is a bit peculiar to listen to this litany of his sins while he’s still got his arms around her. His temper tries to rear but he steps on the beast’s neck. “Yes. And no one in the galaxy hurt my mother worse than he did.”

That pretty well ends the argument right there, particularly given that he’s telling the truth.

The darkness is strained between them. _Comfort_ , he thinks wearily, _not a fight._ He’d been ready to fight back then too, but it wasn’t what he needed.

He draws her head down against his shoulder, wraps his arms tightly around her. “I won’t let you go,” he says. “Not now. Not ever. I will find a way.” Which is also true, so far as it goes.

Maybe there’s more that they could both say, but she wants to believe him. He searches for the words. “I promise you. I will never leave you behind.”

And that’s it. The key to the lock. She is terrified of being abandoned. He opens the connection between them, pours his absolute certainty down it. A thousand branching futures, but not a single one where she’s alone.

As a certain Jedi once said, only Sith deal in absolutes. It may make them evil, but it also makes them extraordinarily convincing.

The tension ebbs from his scavenger girl’s body. She is willing to believe, if not in the future, at least in his determination.

 _Go to sleep_ , he tells her. _I’ll be here when you wake up._

_I promise._

* * *

 

He’s there when she wakes up.

Rey isn’t sure what wakes her. Did someone say her name?

It wasn’t Kylo Ren, that’s for sure. He’s sound asleep, head thrown back. The scar is a ragged seam down his face. He looks younger when he’s asleep, which is amusing, given that he already looks younger than he is.

She slides a hand across his chest, enjoying the feel of smooth muscle, but then she hears something again. Someone is calling her from outside the courtyard.

She slips out of the blankets. The air is still cold, so she picks up Kylo’s cloak and pulls it around her shoulders.

… _child….of deserts_ ….

How odd. It seems like her name is tied up in those words, along with an image of herself. It’s a bit like the Dark Side cave, a sense of doubling, tripling, possibilities feeding back on themselves.

…c _hild…come closer_ …

What is that? It knows her name, or something like her name…

She lowers her shields and reaches out, trying to touch whatever it is, and can’t find it. She hears it in her ears, but where is it? It seems like it’s all around her now.

She takes a few steps forward. “Hello? Where are you?”

… _here_ …

It occurs to Rey that maybe she should wake Kylo up and tell her what she’s hearing.

 _…no…that one is a child of the dark space between stars…you are a child of deserts and stone…only you_ … The voice is definitely gaining strength now, and she knows she should be afraid, but she isn’t. This is only the desert, and the desert she understands.

She steps into the canyon. She can still hear the distant music, but it’s rapidly overwhelmed by the hiss of wind across the sand. Slowly, she raises her head.

Her last thought before the wind scours through her is that the reason she could not see the source of the voice is the same reason a flea can’t see the rancor it’s riding.

 

* * *

 

When Kylo Ren wakes in the morning, his scavenger is gone, leaving only cooling sheets behind her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cue dramatic music!


	25. Chapter 25

Kylo knows immediately that something has gone terribly wrong.

The connection he shares with his scavenger is not missing but _closed_ , as if someone had bricked up a doorway. He can still see the outline where it had been, but nothing is getting in or out.

At the same time, the sense of an enormous presence is much stronger—but now it isn’t watching. He senses a vast indifference. It has no interest in him at all.

He rolls to his feet as if he’s under attack, nearly breaks his neck when the blankets wrap around his ankle, and charges for entrance to the courtyard. She can’t have gone far, can she?

The canyon is empty. He looks around wildly, plunges recklessly into the Force scanning for life, but…nothing.

Small scurrying creatures. His two guards on the shuttle, sleeping. A predator far off in the dunes. And the watcher that is no longer watching.

No other humans. No maddening young Jedi caught between the light and the dark.

Had the _Falcon_ come and taken her in the night? But if so, how had she walled the connection between them off so completely?

The wall doesn’t even feel like her. It’s like a blast door, with no trace of personality—not hers, not anyone’s.

One thing at a time. The shuttle’s logs will tell him if a ship has come to Korriban. He starts toward the shuttle, makes six paces, and stops.

There’s a dark shape on the ground ahead. His heart seizes.

“ _Rey!”_

But it isn’t. It’s his own cloak, lying on the sand. He drops to his knees next to it, unwilling to admit, even to himself, how close he had been to panic.

She’d been here. She’d left his bed and went out into the canyon, wrapped in his cloak. And then something happened and she’d dropped it behind her. He picks it up, drapes it over his shoulders, but there’s no trace of her body heat left on it.

The thought comes to him, unbidden, that maybe she’s a better Jedi than he ever dreamed, maybe his uncle had taught her this one last skill, maybe he’s been alone on Korriban this entire time, making love to a ghost.

No. He’ll believe a lot of things, but his cloak smells like sex still, and surely that’s a level of detail too far for hallucination.

He has to get to the shuttle and check the logs. Check the sensors, too. If something’s managed to wall her off from the Force so he can’t find her, there’s a chance she’s somewhere nearby, maybe injured. Maybe imprisoned.

If something has kidnapped her, he will hunt them to the ends of the galaxy. He’ll learn the old Sith techniques of prolonging life and he’ll follow them for a thousand years if he has to.

He looks toward the shuttle. The wind hisses in his ears and he begins to run.

 

* * *

 

Kylo Ren sits in the cockpit of the shuttle, staring at the sensor readouts. They haven’t changed in two hours.

He went outside earlier and carved a boulder into rubble, enough violence to keep the black tide at bay. He cannot afford to be distracted by temper right now.

The ship logs don’t change.

No ship has come to Korriban. The logs show four humans in the immediate area until shortly after dawn. Then there is a brief flare of magnetic energy and only three humans remain.

She hasn’t been vaporized. She’s possibly outside of sensor range or shielded somehow. The sensor reading shows something weird happening, her life signs dwindling in a way he can’t figure out. Had she gone underground? Walked behind some kind of shielding device?

She is not dead. Kylo would know if she was dead. He’s sure of it.

He will not allow a universe to exist in which she is dead.

Very well. If the ship instruments can’t help, he’ll use the Force, break down the wall over the connection, and find her.

He goes back out to the campsite. It’s the place that feels most like her. He sits down cross-legged and begins to breathe. Deep and slow, inhale, exhale, calm.

It’s not hard to flood his thoughts with her. If anything, it’s hard to stop. The boneless weight of her the first time he carried her…the smile on her face when it rained on Ach-To…the expression of fierce concentration as she soldered a relay…the way her nails had dug into his hips and the touch of her mind and the smell of her skin…

Kylo Ren is not, as he himself admits, a precision instrument. That’s fine. If you want to break down a wall, a sledgehammer is better than a sword.

He makes his memories into a sledgehammer and slams against the closed door in his mind.

For a long moment, he can’t see any change. He hits the connection again, battering against it like a siege engine, even though it’s inside his own head and his skull rings with it, even as he starts to worry he’s going to break himself, but that’s fine, he’s already pretty broken, what’s one more thing, really, it’s not like you get extra points at the end if you die with your sanity intact…

The wall cracks.

Triumph rips through him but he doesn’t dare stop. He keeps hammering on the Force bond, grinding his teeth so hard they’re in danger of splintering, determined to crash through whatever barrier separates him from his scavenger girl.

And then it breaks and everything goes red.

 

* * *

 

He only loses consciousness for a few seconds, he thinks. But it’s hard to tell because he is either not in his body or his body’s gone somewhere else.

Either way, he’s not in the campsite any longer.

He’s standing in the desert and the wind is beginning to howl around him. There’s a cloud on the horizon that looks more like a wall.

As it happens, Kylo has never seen a sandstorm. He’s not even sure if that’s what he’s looking at. But the wind is already spitting sand into his face and he has to put up his arm to ward it off.

He looks around for cover, but there’s nothing but miles of sand, no rocks higher than his ankle, nothing but the sand and the shrieking wind.

_This could be bad_.

He reaches out with the Force to try to locate his scavenger. Is she lost here in the sandstorm?

He doesn’t sense her. Mostly what he senses is the watcher.

Kylo appears to have gotten its attention again. In fact, he appears to have annoyed it. The vast, impersonal presence he felt before is now a vast, irritated one. Whatever he just did, it didn’t like it.

The words that form in his mind are etched in stone. … _go…away_ …

“Give her back!” Kylo shouts into the sandstorm.

… _no_ …

“She doesn’t belong to you!”

… _a child of deserts…we are desert…she is of us...she becomes us…_

He feels the watcher all around him. An impossible hugeness. It’s in the sandstorm, it is the sandstorm, it’s bigger than that, it’s swirling cloud and ancient pain and hidden springs and predators in the dunes and the valley of Sith tombs standing out like a scar and of course it is because Kylo Ren belatedly realizes he’s arguing with the planet Korriban itself.

_I should probably have seen that coming_.

A normal person might be humbled by this, but Sith are not prone to humility. Instead he thinks _Space, what is_ with _this girl and planets? First the farmworld, now this?_

This is no gentle farmworld. This is a tomb world, the mother of all tomb worlds, a mausoleum of ancient horrors, of forgotten Sith atrocities in the dark. This is a world fattened on the deaths of Jedi.

It occurs to him, yet again, that coming to Korriban may have been a slight tactical error.

… _leave_ …

“Give her _back_!” Kylo shouts again, desperately reaching through the connection—and then he feels her.

It’s only a thread, the barest glimmer of presence, somewhere ahead. But that’s enough. He plunges forward into the sandstorm, and he doesn’t even know if it’s real or not anymore, maybe this is all happening somewhere in the Force, that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that Rey is out there somewhere and he’ll find her.

He promised.

The wind screams at him. The sand stings his face, the arm he’s holding up, whips into his nose and mouth and eyes. He can’t look ahead and he knows he’s not walking a straight line but he clings to that thread of presence and staggers forward.

It takes hours. The wind flays his skin raw. If not for the gloves, he expects his hands would be nothing but bone and tendon by now. His lips crack and bleed. He has no idea if he’s getting any closer, but he still has that thin thread leading him on.

It does not occur to him to stop.

It is no worse than some of the things Snoke did to him. It is lasting a great deal longer, that’s all. The storm never ends. His lungs burn and sand cakes at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

When his legs give out, he is more angry than alarmed. The impact as he hits the ground seems to travel from a long way away. He lies there for a few minutes, furious at himself—why is he not _getting up_?

Korriban wants him to give up. He beats himself with that thought like a whip until he manages to rise to his knees. The wind bays around his ears like a starving beast, sensing weakness.

The thread is still there. After a time, Kylo Ren begins to crawl.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everybody who guessed it was Korriban, good job. (I like the idea of sentient planets, what can I say?)


	26. Chapter 26

Rey is in the desert.

The sand hisses past, ruffled by the wind. The sky is a hard, endless violet. She is walking, feeling the wind whip her hair back from her face, smelling the clean scent of emptiness.

She is inside Korriban and Korriban is inside her.

She is still not afraid. She is angry (and Korriban is angry.) She is lonely (and Korriban is lonely.)

All its people left so long ago. The Sith left it and then ships struck it, scalding it with their weapons, and then it was alone. As soon as people come, they are scraped away. It knows they have tiny mayfly lives, yet even those are denied to it.

Korriban has been waiting here for eons, in the searing light of its primary, waiting for someone to return.

Now she has.

She is a creature of deserts and darkness and Korriban is a desert and the darkness burns in it like a shattered star. It recognizes her and it needs her and she needs it desperately in return. And now they are together.

Only one thing mars her contentment, and through her, the planet’s.

Something binds her still. Something that doesn’t belong here, a creature that does not understand deserts, a creature that has spent most of its life on deck plates instead of stone. A wounded but persistent thing, too mad or stupid to know when it’s been defeated.

She and Korriban will have to deal with that later. But not now.

For now, all that she needs to know is that, at last, she has come home.

 

* * *

 

 

When he wakes at last, Kylo Ren doesn’t know where he is. His muscles are stiff from lying on stone. His mouth is painfully dry.

The last thing he remembers is collapsing in the sandstorm. He crawled for what felt like hours, while the wind flayed the skin from his face, until his strength gave out.

His last thought was that despite all his promises, he has failed his scavenger girl.

He slowly sits up. His head throbs.

He’s back in the courtyard with the spring. Probably he never left. He’s still got all his skin and there’s no sand in his mouth, so most likely the endless desert was only in his head.

The connection is walled up again. Korriban pays him no more attention than a flea.

_Shit_.

The magnitude of his failure sinks into him like a knife. The one promise that he made and meant was that he would never abandon her. He knows his love is a scarred and broken thing, he knows he’s better at savagery than tenderness, but the one thing he has to offer her—since apparently she doesn’t want to rule the galaxy—is that he will not let go.

Now she’s been torn away from him, and he has no idea how to reach her.

Despair washes over him, but that’s fine. He knows despair like the back of his hand. He learned long ago to keep moving through it. It’s just one more cloak to lay over his shoulders.

He gets unsteadily to his knees and has to clutch the stones around the spring for support.

He’s thirsty. He heaves himself over the rock and half-falls in the spring. The water is shockingly cold.

He gulps it down until he begins to shiver violently. Some distant voice in his memory tells him not to drink too much.

_Not too much, you’ll freeze...They don’t have snow on Jakku, do they?_ he thinks. He said that, didn’t he? A few hundred years ago?

He sits on the edge of the stone, gathering his strength. He can see her pack from here, see the edge of the blankets, a painful reminder that she was here in his arms last night and now she’s been taken…somewhere…by Korriban.

He can’t give up. He remembers the thread that he felt in the Force desert, the thinnest awareness that she is still out there somewhere, that she is not quite gone.

_Very well_.

He breathes deeply. He is too exhausted for temper. Someone will die for this eventually.

He will get her back.

If she can no longer come back to him…if the thread is only a ghost or if the planet has unmade her mind…then he will pound Korriban into red slag, scour every trace of life from its surface, leave it a barren heap of glass. _Like the Jedi should have done years ago._

He grins to himself, a humorless baring of teeth. That’s always the way, isn’t it? If you want the job done, while the Jedi stand around wringing their hands, call a Sith.

He staggers to his feet.

It is a long walk back to the shuttle. He moves like he’s dead drunk, like he only just learned to walk. In his head, other memories move in. Aftermath of other torments. _We’re taking you to the medbay._

Yes. The medbay would be good. The planet’s swatted him like a gnat, left him half-dead. There are no Knights of Ren to carry him this time.

Kylo seizes on that thought like a lifeline.

The Knights.

_His_ Knights.

There are twelve left alive, scattered throughout the galaxy, commanding destroyers and dreadnoughts. Twelve people that are…he thinks…loyal to him above the First Order.

Calling on them is dangerous. He pulls them all together, Hux will think it’s a coup (which is ironic given that Kylo is supposed to be the Supreme Leader) and things will probably get out of hand.

He doesn’t need all twelve, though. He only needs two.

He climbs the last brutal stretch of trail to the shuttle and slumps against the landing strut. He just has to get inside. Once he’s inside, everything gets easier.

Kylo Ren staggers up the ramp into his shuttle. The two guards see him and leap to their feet.

“Supreme Leader!”

They each get under an arm and carry him into the shuttle’s tiny medbay. He hates to show weakness in front of them, but it hardly matters now.

One asks what happened and he snarls a denial and palms the door switch, locking them outside.

The medical droid confirms what he already guessed. Something bad happened. He’s dehydrated, exhausted, suffering from some kind of stress the computer isn’t quite sure about—heat exhaustion or hypothermia or maybe shock, it doesn’t know but it’s _really_ not happy, has he looked at his electrolytes lately?

He slaps a stimpatch directly onto his neck, feeling the sudden edgy clarity of stimulants. It won’t last long, but it doesn’t have to.

“Computer,” he rasps, leaning on the steel edge of the table. “Send a message to Ban Kalla, commander of _Ravenous_.”

The computer pings assent. He reads it a phrase, a Twi’lek saying about courtesy to one’s enemies. It doesn’t translate but that doesn’t matter because Ban Kalla will know what it means.

“End transmission,” he says, and the medical computer is blinking at him to get his ass into the chair, it’s afraid he’s going to crash, his blood pressure is somewhere down in his toes, the stimpatch is the only thing keeping him from falling over like a ton of Sith-shaped bricks.

Pulling even two ships from their current maneuvers is going to cause a disruption in the First Order and potentially leave his position precarious. Kylo Ren finds that he does not give even the tiniest shred of a fuck about that.

“One more,” he tells the computer. “Send a message to Sila Rakkar, commander of the _Steadfast_.” He takes a deep breath, moving to the chair. “Sila,” he says, his last words before the medical droid embraces him, “I need you to bake me a cake.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, ok, I know I said we were done with her, but after he has screwed up so spectacularly I could not deny Sila the chance to give him a piece of her mind.


	27. Chapter 27

_Ravenous_ and _Steadfast_ both make the system thirty-six hours later. Ironically, they arrive within five minutes of each other, which means that Kylo gets two identical simultaneous transmissions asking if the other one has turned traitor and needs to be dealt with.

He laughs for the first time since his scavenger was taken, looking at the split screen, where Sila is offering to have a heart-to-heart “talk” with Ban Kalla and Ban is offering to turn _Ravenous_ ’s guns on _Steadfast_ and blow it out of the sky.

Well, the Twi’lek has a dreadnaught. When you have a hammer that large, you can treat the rest of the galaxy like a nail, whether it looks like one or not.

Kylo pulls both transmissions up, bridges them, and says “As far as I know, neither of you are traitors, but I appreciate the thought. I need your help.”

“Of course,” says Ban.

“Whatever you need, big guy.” Sila looks over at the other Knight and grins. “Hey, Ban.”

“It has been too long, Sila Rakkar.”

“You say that every time.” 

“Every time, it is true.”

“Smooth talker.”

Ban smiles. He has light blue skin and both of his lekku—head-tails—were severed in a battle some years ago, one a few inches lower than the other. The prosthetics are gleaming metal and look like vertebrae. Kylo knows that the other man could easily have chosen more lifelike versions, but among Twi’lek, the prehensile metal is considered exceedingly menacing.

“You gonna run away with me this time, Ban?” asks Sila, who has been barking up that tree, mostly jokingly, for years.

“I fear that I am not yet strong enough to survive the experience.” 

Kylo shakes his head, fighting back a smile. The normalcy of this exchange comforts him more than he’d thought possible. His scavenger girl may have been stolen by a planet, but by god, Sila and Ban are still flirting and that means the galaxy is not completely off-kilter.

“All right, big guy,” says Sila. “What’s up?”

“Do you require counsel or firepower?” asks Ban.

He finds that he’s unwilling to leave the planet. Even if Korriban is hostile (and it is hostile) he worries that Rey can sense him while he’s here, and if he left, she might think he’d truly abandoned her.

“I need both of you down here,” he says. “First for counsel…and then we’ll worry about the firepower.”

They both nod. Ban glances over at Sila. “May I have permission to dock my shuttle on _Steadfast?”_

“Sweetheart, you can dock your ship here any time.” A stream of numbers appear under her holographic image as she sends across coordinates and docking permissions.

“Then I will collect you and make planetfall in one hour.”

Kylo Ren nods.

He slept for thirty hours of thirty-six, while the medical droid patches up whatever the hell Korriban did to him. He hates the time wasted on his body’s weakness, but he has no choice.

When he could walk without feeling faint, he went down to her camp and picked up her gear. The blankets smell like her. He carries everything back to the shuttle, places it in his private quarters, and prays to gods he doesn’t believe in that they will not become relics, like Vader’s mask is a relic.

_No. No, I will get her back, even if I have to spend my life making up for having lost her in the first place._

He tells himself that it will be fine.

He has a plan. 

 

* * *

 

 

Ban Kalla’s shuttle, as befits the commander of a dreadnaught, is larger than the standard star destroyer shuttles. It includes what amounts to a conference room, and so the three Knights meet on that instead of in Kylo Ren’s increasingly lived-in personal shuttle.

Ban’s got a couple of guards, all of them somber-eyed Twi’leks. They stand, backs straight, as the three Knights walk past and into the conference room.

Sila hugs him. He wasn’t expecting that. Ban Kalla reaches out and clasps his forearm, wrist to wrist, one of the prehensile metal head-tails touching his shoulder, as affectionate a gesture as a Twi’lek can manage with another species.

_Do I look that bad?_ he wonders vaguely.

“You look like hammered shit,” says Sila, answering the question before he asks it.

“It’s been a long week.”

“Yeah, I got that.” She gives him a long, thoughtful look, then looks over at Ban Kalla. Kylo Ren sees them exchange a glance but isn’t sure what it means.

“It’s a long story,” he says, gesturing them to seats at the conference table.

They sit. They look at him expectantly.

Kylo starts to talk.

He doesn’t spare himself in the telling. He includes his failures, because they’ll come out anyway and it’s more important to get his scavenger girl back than it is to preserve his ego. He tries to gloss over the sex as lightly as possible, but he can’t very well leave it out.

Ban Kalla sits, for the entire recitation, with his hands folded in front of him and an expression of polite interest on his face. Ban has the best poker face in the galaxy.

Sila is…not quite so restrained. At various points, she puts her head in her hands, covers her eyes, and at the point where he mentions using the Force bond to finish things off for Rey the first night, she actually puts her forehead on the conference table and mutters something that sounds like “Kill me now.”

When Kylo finally finishes the saga and sits back, there is a long silence, and then Sila explodes.

“Permission to speak freely, _sir?”_ she snaps. She does not actually add _you dumb motherfucker_ on the end, but it’s strongly implied.

Well, he knew that was going to happen.

“Go ahead,” he says wearily, because she’s going to speak freely anyway and he might as well get it over with.

_“Did you listen to a word I said?!”_

“Yes! I took your advice!” And when her gaze pins him like a butterfly on a card, “Well…mostly?”

Her glare could etch blast doors. Kylo tries "The general shape of your advice?"

Ban Kalla’s lips twitch.

“What _I’m_ trying to figure out,” says Sila acidly, “is why, when I said ‘give her the thing you needed back then’ you assumed I meant a good deep dicking!”

“Ah…”

“And you took her Korriban. _Korriban._ Oh gee, let's take the two most powerful Force users in the galaxy to Korriban and then let’s fuck, that can’t possibly go wrong!”

“Sila…”

Silla puts her face in her hands. “The two of you? Having…I dunno, conflicted hate-sex? In the middle of Korriban? _Of course_ you woke something up! I’m surprised you didn’t wake _me_ up! Half the galaxy should have felt that one!”

_“Sila.”_

He’s starting to regret giving her permission to speak freely.

She slumps back into her chair. “I say this with love, big guy, but dear _god_ you have screwed up.”

“Thank you, Commander Rakkar, for that succinct analysis,” says Ban. “With which I concur.”

“I have made some tactical miscalculations, yes,” says Kylo.

“Starkiller was a tactical miscalculation! This was pure bleeding idiocy! And why _Korriban_ , of all places?”

Kylo throws one of his oldest friends under the At-At with no hesitation. “Ban had uncovered the most fascinating research about a site there…”

Sila turns a wide, furious gaze on the Twi’lek. “Ban! You didn’t!”

His head tails knot together at the ends. “I…ah. It was quite fascinating?”

Judging by Sila’s expression, there are not enough muffins in the galaxy to take the edge off her outrage at men in general and Kylo and Ban in particular.

Being, ostensibly, the leader of the Knights of Ren, Kylo makes a command decision. “If I admit that you are right and I am stupid, can we move on to the bit where we get my Jedi back from the planet?”

Sila breathes heavily through her nose for a minute. She is quite clearly not ready to move on just yet. Apparently she realizes that they are reaching the limits of Kylo’s temper, though, so she sits back grimly. “Fine.” She holds up both hands. “Fine, fine. It happens. You’re not the first man to think with your…ah…”

“Lightsaber?” says Ban Kalla, an expression of tranquil innocence on his face.

“…lightsaber, yes, thank you.” She rubs her face. “As long as she’s not dead, we’ll figure something out.”

“She isn’t dead.” The conviction in his voice leaves no room for argument or discussion.

Ban and Sila exchange glances again. Sila nods. “All right then.”

“I do not wish to pry into an intimate moment,” says Ban diffidently, “but may we view the second time you sensed Korriban watching? Your description tells me one thing, but I do not wish to rely on the vagaries of language for something so important.”

Kylo nods and strips off his gloves. Ban, of all people, knows the difficulties of translation. The Twi’lek has confessed to him on more than one occasion how he feels that Galactic does not quite map to his own native tongue, which relies on small motions of the lekku to add nuance.

Sila mutters something about three brains being better than two, particularly if the other two brains are thinking with their lightsabers, and holds out her hand.

Kylo pulls them both into the memory with him, the cool stone and the lazy contentment, the warm weight of his scavenger girl in his arms. Then the sudden feeling of the watcher all around them, focus sharpening. Sitting up, pulling her with him, ready to shield her from the threat, whatever it is. The vastness of it. The sense of concentration.

Then she wakes and the watcher’s focus shifts and Kylo can no longer feel it.

He breaks off the memory before it continues. The rest is personal and Sila and Ban don’t need to see that.

Ban is looking thoughtful. Sila’s looking at him thoughtfully. Oddly, these are two different expressions.

“This puts me in memory of something,” says Ban. He rises from the chair. “If you will allow me a few hours of time to research it…”

Kylo nods. Ban, for all that he’s an able commander, has the heart of an archivist. “Anything you can find that might help.”

“Oh good,” says Sila, as the door closes behind the Twi’lek. “A few hours? That should be just about enough time for me to finish saying all the things I want to say…”

Kylo Ren takes off his lightsaber, sets it down out of arm’s reach, and prepares to be read the riot act, yet again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am finally back from traveling, and so must apologize because updates will likely be a bit slower now that I am no longer grimly killing time in airports and hotels.


	28. Chapter 28

Sila’s second furious dressing-down lasts about five minutes, whereupon Ban Kalla opens the door and politely asks them to go outside because the swearing is distracting him from his work.

They tromp down the ramp and outside. Kylo slumps against a landing strut. “Are you going to start yelling again?” he asks wearily.

“No.” She leans against the same strut, on the other side. “I think I made my point.”

She didn’t just make her point, she drove it into his forehead, but Kylo’s not going to risk starting the tirade up again. Besides, it’s not like he didn’t mostly deserve it.

The two of them lean back to back with the strut between them. Physically they’re as different as humans get—the small round woman and the tall, broad-shouldered man, but there’s something around the eyes that marks them as alike. If you separated humanity out, these two would stand a long way from the angels, a fact which troubles neither of them.

Kylo stares across the canyon. It looks deceptively peaceful, not at all the sort of place that conceals a malign intelligence that kidnapped his scavenger girl.

Even the thought is like a dull knife in his gut. He wraps his arms around himself as if trying to staunch the bleeding from an unseen wound. How the hell is he going to get her back?

“So this is Korriban.” Sila scowls. “The ancient Sith had no taste. They couldn’t pick someplace with a beach, maybe?” She glances over at him. “Seriously though, big guy. Why _here,_ of all places?”

“I had to do something,” he says. “She’s a Jedi.”

Sila raises an eyebrow. “And?”

“What Jedi in their right mind would want me?”

She snorts. “Find me a Jedi in their right mind and we’ll worry about it then.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. Are you worried she doesn’t like you as a man or as a murderous tyrant?”

“…I’m not a murderous tyrant.”

“Not yet, but I have faith. You're still young.”

It’s his turn to snort, although he appreciates the confidence. “Look, I offered her the galaxy and she didn’t want it. All that leaves is my personal charm. Hence, Korriban.”

Sila tilts her head, acknowledging that Kylo Ren has an uphill battle in the personal charm department.  “Mmm. I see the problem.”

They stand in silence. The wind hisses like an angry cat.

“Suppose we _do_ get her back,” says Sila. “Suppose she’s not the same.”

A line forms between his eyes. “What?”

Sila doesn’t look at him, just stares off into the desert. Her tone is as light and emotionless as if they are discussing the proper ratio of nuts in a recipe. “Suppose this breaks her. Suppose she’s not sane. Suppose she’s Force-blind. Suppose she’s not pretty any more. Would you still want her then?”

The lightsaber whine is astonishingly loud, even over the sound of the wind. For all that Kylo Ren fights more like a charging bull than a dancer, he can move very fast when he’s angry.

_“Do you think I care about that?”_

Sila gazes at the blade dispassionately. It’s six inches from her throat. She doesn’t flinch. Had it not been made of energy, one gets the impression that she would have put a finger on it and moved it aside.

“I don’t know,” she says calmly. “That’s why I asked. Do you?”

Kylo stares at her for a long moment, then turns around and stalks to the edge of the cliff, where he chops a sandstone boulder apart for several minutes. Gravel patters down into the canyon below.

“No,” he says, when the rock is completely dismantled. He turns the lightsaber off. “I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care if she can’t lift a single rock or feel the Force or if she’s as scarred up as I am. I would still want her back.”

“Hmm,” says Sila, folding her arms. “Why?” Her voice is still light, dry, unemotional. It is the sort of voice a surgeon might use, wrist deep in the patient in front of her.

“She’s mine.”

Sila finally shows emotion—derision. “Yes, women _love_ to be treated like pets.”

“No! I mean…she’s…” He gestures aimlessly at Sila, at Ban’s shuttle. “Like you. Or Ban. Or any of the knights. She’s one of my people.” 

“Flattering, but you’d hardly be working yourself into a lather like this over one of us.”

He flushes a little, because she’s right. He’d cross the galaxy for his Knights, slaughter planets without a second thought, but he’d be cold while he did it. As cold as Sila is now. “I promised her, Sila. That she wouldn’t have to be alone again.” 

“Why did you promise that?” 

“Because she was afraid!” He’s going to have to find another rock to carve up if this keeps up. “She was terrified. Her fucking parents abandoned her, Skywalker abandoned her, you know the Resistance is going to throw her out when they find out she’s going dark. I’m all she’ll have left. I _can’t_ leave her. And…” He swallows. “I don’t want to.” 

“Hmmm,” says Sila again.

He looks at her. The black tide has receded enough for him to be ruefully amused. “You dig in and ask me things that would get someone else killed, and all you have to say is _‘Hmmm_ ’?”

Sila grins abruptly. “Let us say that I think there may be hope for you yet, big guy.” She steps up and claps him on the arm, although she has to reach up to do it.

After a minute he says “I’ve got decent caf back at my shuttle.”

He will never apologize for pulling a blade on her. She will never expect him to. Part of friendship is not expecting things that your friends are not equipped to give. And decent caf is not to be sneezed at. “Sounds good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have mercy, friends! I know updates are slower, but I have these pesky loved ones who insist they want to spend time with me on weekends. (I know, it confuses me, too.)


	29. Chapter 29

Rey is sitting in a half-ruined house, doing nothing except existing.

That is enough for the planet. The planet wants people. She is people. That is all that the planet wants from her, to do people things and exist and be part of it and take the place of the ones who have gone before.

Rey has never seen a dollhouse and would not recognize one if she encountered it, but it teases a memory of being very young and having a tiny, shapeless stuffed toy that she would put to bed at night beside her.

She doesn’t mind. Korriban was lonely for humans and she is lonely and the desert wind sings to her skin and her nerves and her heart, telling her that she is home, she is here, in this place, she only needs to exist and her existence is enough.

There is still something out there, but it has tried and failed to reach her. She doesn’t need to worry about it. Korriban is all she needs.

She sleeps at night and the endless wind whistles a lullaby past her ears.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ban Kalla comes back with his research two hours later, during which time Sila has taken over the shuttle’s galley and made scones.

“I mean, they’re not great,” she says. “This is synthetic vanilla and they never get the aromatics quite right.” She drops the plate on the table. “Now let’s hear what you’ve got.”

Ban nods. “Commander, a question. Did you have a sense of _why_ the planet wanted her?”

Kylo Ren blinked. “Uh,” he says.

“Did you attempt to ask?”

“…I was a little busy.”

“Of course not,” mutters Sila. “He wants her, so it only seems logical to him. Doubt the planet’s after her body, though.”

The Twi’lek steeples his fingers and nods to Kylo Ren. “As I suspected. It was the fact that Korriban was clearly interested in her, not in you, that intrigued me. You are both powerful Force users and of the same species. If one was interested in procuring a Sith, you would be a far more obvious choice. But the planet appears to have sifted through both your memories and then settled on her and rejected you completely.”

“Maybe it likes women,” says Sila. Kylo rolls his eyes.

“That is a possibility,” admits Ban Kalla. “Though I thought it more likely that it chose the one it thought would mount a less fierce defense. Or it is possible that whatever it had to offer as bait would appeal to one and not the other. Or it may have to do with any number of things. It is difficult to know the mind of a planet.”

Kylo wants to scream with impatience, but he learned a long time ago that Ban will present his case thoroughly, logically, and in his own damn time. He slouches back in the chair and waits.

“It was the idea of knowing the mind of a planet that jogged my memory. There are historical records of both Jedi, Sith, and unaligned manifestations of Force power going back centuries.” Ban taps the conference table. What looks like a stone tablet covered in text appears, in the Twi’lek language, which reshapes itself into Galactic. “This is a translation of one of the records. It names a number of varieties of Force power which we would recognize today—healing, destruction, mental influence, telekinesis, telepathy, precognition, etc. But it also has listings for unusual or idiosyncratic manifestations of the Force. Empathy with beasts is among them, along with the ability to project images, the ability to teleport, the control of weather…”

Kylo Ren rubs his forehead. “Is this going somewhere?”

“Let the man talk. And have a scone.”

He complies. Ban Kalla nods to him. “Indeed it is. Unusual talents are not unheard of, by any stretch, particularly among powerful Force users. Sila’s manipulation of the Force around her to put people at ease is a mild example.”

“Works in my sleep, too,” says Sila cheerfully. “I once had an assassin take a nap in the same room because he was tired. Poor bastard snored. I mean, he didn’t once I cut his head off, obviously.”

“…indeed.” Ban nods. “The Skywalker lineage itself has a wild talent that makes them above-average starship pilots.”

Kylo Ren grunts. He doesn’t actually like piloting. He’s good at it, he just doesn’t enjoy it much. This was a source of tension with his father, among all the _other_ sources of tension.

“It occurred to me that the extreme sensitivity of planets to the Jedi Rey’s presence might be a manifestation of an unusual Force talent. So I went searching through the archives looking for other examples of this talent.”

“And?” says Kylo.

“And I found one.” Ban taps the table again, flicks his metal lekku-tip over a control, and another set of texts appear. These look very old, written on scraped hide. “On Kashyyyk, of all places.”

“Kashyyyk? The Wookie homeworld?”

“Indeed, and even this is a translation. It tells of a shaman who had to take her people across the dangerous ground level, below the trees. Such a journey, with an entire village in tow, would be nearly impossible on Kashyyyk. But she spoke to the world itself, according to the story—the _world_ , not the predators, not the spirits—and the world agreed to aid her. It cleared a path of obstacles and led her to the next stand of trees. The killing fogs drew back like curtains. Wild beasts guarded them while they slept. They arrived safely at their destination.”

“Sounds like a myth,” said Sila.

“It does, yes.” Ban Kalla nodded. “But the shaman’s talent is actually one of those recorded later, and this myth was cross-referenced to other, more modern stories. It is an old power and not one seen often, but the texts agree that there are those who can, indeed, command entire planets. Not merely sense them, as even many ordinary Force users can, but communicate with and compel them.”

“Dear god,” whispers Sila. “Think what you could do with a power like that.”

Kylo shakes his head. “The farmworld nearly killed her!”

“And the first time you flew a ship, if you had flown it into a wall, your talent would not have saved you.” Ban Talla taps his lekku-tips together. “That does not mean your talent does not exist, merely that it cannot save you from inexperience.”

Kylo sighs. “All right. So suppose she’s got some weird wild talent and planets want to cozy up to her…” He’s already thinking through the ramifications—if Korriban’s anything to go by, he and Rey will have to live on ships or stations or artificial planets with no personality, which is fine, he’s spent most of his life on ships, that’s perfectly normal. If she misses the desert, he’ll build her a goddamn artificial environment and stock it with cactus and lizards. “What does that _mean?”_

Ban Kalla considers this. “I do not wish to speculate too freely,” he admits. “Who am I to know the mind of a world? But I suspect that Korriban noticed her, where it might not have noticed another. Once it had been roused, it had to figure out which of you two it wanted. If you think of a planet as a mind that moves in geologic time, it acted extraordinarily swiftly. And now that it has her…well. Apparently it does not wish to let her go.”

Kylo Ren nods slowly. It’s more information than he had, but it doesn’t change his plan.

He tells them what he wants them to do.

Ban Kalla’s lekku give a shiver, a soft metallic clicking all along their length. Sila lets out a single appreciative “Ha!”

He doesn’t ask if they think it will work. If they had better ideas, they’d tell him.

“Give me four hours,” says Ban Kalla. “I will wish to move partway around the world for this, and to find a spot that will not be ecologically significant.” Ban, while perfectly willing to murder people with his bare head-tails, has always balked at environmental destruction. He says that it is an affront to scientific inquiry, and that while sentients have always done something worth dying over, ecosystems exist in a state of grace. Kylo has always chalked this up as a personal quirk and, since it’s important to Ban, respected it.

“Take me up with you,” says Sila. “I’ll come back down in my own shuttle.” 

Kylo raises an eyebrow at her. She raises one right back at him. “Big guy, you know we’re buddies, but there is no chance that this is not going to knock me on my ass. I don’t mind that part, but I’m _not_ bunking with your guards while I recuperate. You can spare me for an hour to get an extra pillow and a toothbrush.”

There is no arguing with this logic. “Four hours, then,” says Kylo Ren. “And then we’ll see what a dreadnaught and two Sith can do.”


	30. Chapter 30

Rey wakes thirsty.

There is a small pool near the ruined dwelling and she goes to it. Korriban has provided for its people.

When she bends over the edge to drink, she sees her reflection. It appears to be screaming at her.

_How odd_ , she thinks. It is the first thought that belongs only to her and not to her and the planet that she has had for some days.

Her reflection beats on the underside of the water with her fists, shouting words that Rey cannot make out. 

It is unsettling.

But she has nothing to worry about. Korriban will take care of her. Korriban does not want her to worry. Korriban needs her simply to exist. 

Rey wipes her hand through the surface of the water, breaking up the reflections, and drinks.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ban Kalla and Sila Rakkar watch the planet fall away beneath them. 

“So this is a thing we’re doing,” says Sila, both amused and bemused at how things have gone.

Ban is edgy. Sila only knows this because she’s known the Twi’lek for years, since he was a gawky adolescent too young to file his teeth. She pushes a little more power into her aura, trying to calm him.

It doesn’t seem to work. After a minute, Sila sighs and gives up. She is not a person to avoid mentioning the bantha in the room. “All right, Ban, what’s wrong? Lay it on me.”

“I have concerns,” Ban Kalla says, in the same tone that other people might announce a funeral.

“ _About_ our fearless leader or _for_ him?” Sila’s tone is light, almost conspiratorial. Inwardly, her heart sinks a little. If Ban is about to admit something treasonous, she will be surprised, saddened, then lead him down a rabbit hole of carefully ambiguous phrasing, and then report the whole damn thing to Kylo Ren.

“Mostly for him,” says Ban. Sila relaxes.

The Twi’lek brushes a lekku-tip across her shoulder. She suspects that Ban was fully aware of her internal calculations. Honestly, she’d be a little disappointed in him if he wasn’t.

“I don’t know if this is wise.”

Sila shrugs. “Wise? When has he ever been wise? Never stopped us before. Anyway, he’s in love. I always knew when he went, he’d fall hard.”

The Twi’lek sighs. “I am afraid _Ravenous_ does not have enough firepower.”

“For Korriban?”

“It is a planet, and this is a dreadnought, not the Death Star. And the First Order will not allow him to simply divert ships at his whim for long, either.”

“Mmm.” Sila leans against the glass. “Yes. That. He’s not thinking about that now.”

“Then we must think of it for him. We may save his Jedi and lose a great deal more.”

_“Steadfast_ will help, but I get your drift.” She frowns. “May be time to call on reinforcements, then. Skale’s only a couple hours away, and he’s got _Earthshaker_.”

“ _Two_ dreadnoughts pulled from duty? Are you are proposing open defiance of the Order, Commander Rakkar?”

She grins at him. “If it comes to that, yes. You know I’ve wanted to go privateer for years.”

He nods. “So long as we are clear.”

“That gonna cramp your style at all, Ban?” 

The Twi’lek considers. “It is not a convenient time, but it is never a convenient time for a coup. It is no worse than some others.”

“How about I make the call? If it goes bad, you can still claim deniability.”

This is a large offer and they both know it. They stand in silence as Korriban’s landforms shrink to an indistinct red-orange swirl across the sphere. The familiar rattling and internal clanking of docking gear being deployed starts up in the ship’s bones. 

Ban says, at last, “I worry for you, too, Sila Rakkar. If the planet lashes out, you will be caught alongside Kylo Ren.”

“Awww. You’re sweet.”

A Twi’lek guard announces that the shuttle has docked with _Steadfast._

Sila stands on her tip-toes and kisses Ban on the cheek. He wraps a head-tail briefly around her shoulders.

“Don’t worry,” she calls, heading out the door. “I’ll be around to give you grief for years to come.”

“I shall hold you to that promise,” he says, as the door closes between them.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Kylo Ren listens to about a third of a call from Hux, who’s pale skin is mottled with red blotches of rage. He shuts it off when the yelling starts to get on his nerves.

Hux wants to know what the hell he thinks he doing pulling _Steadfast_ and _Ravenous_ off maneuvers. Kylo thinks wearily that Hux probably needs to be slammed into a wall again. He’s getting very tired of doing that.

Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he’s getting tired of the bit where he _stops_ slamming Hux into a wall before the other man’s eyeballs pop out of his skull. He always has to be so damn careful not to throw him headfirst and not to break anything really important and it just takes all the joy out of senseless violence.

_Ughh_.

He sends a short message, text only, that he required the ships to deal with a problem. He will inform Hux when the General needs to know more.

He signs it “Supreme Leader” just because that will piss Hux off.

Sila’s shuttle lands smoothly, which is definitely a sign that she isn’t flying it. Sila is very good at piloting a ship so that no one dies. She feels that other considerations, like whether her passengers have painted the cockpit with their lunch, are for lesser beings.

She strolls down the landing ramp, carrying…

“Is that a _cushion?”_

“Yep,” says Sila, unruffled. “I know, I know, all you tough guys sit your asses down on stone and get meditative. Me, I don’t want rock prints on my butt. Now where do you want to do this?”

He shakes his head, but leads her to the courtyard with the spring. He sits cross-legged. Sila deploys her cushion.

Kylo Ren has a bulky wrist communicator. He taps out a code and says “ _Ravenous_ , do you read me?”

“ _Ravenous_ here, sir,” says Ban’s voice, tinny through the connection. “Target acquired. We are in position.”

“Thirty minutes from my mark, then, or until Sila gives the order.”

“Understood.”

“Mark.” 

He puts the transmission into a holding pattern, unsnaps the wrist cuff and hands it to Sila. She puts it on, muttering to herself as the strap goes nearly twice around her forearm.

“Ready?” He holds out an ungloved hand, resting across his knee.

“Ready as I’m going to be.” She laces her fingers with his, their wrists alongside each other. “Try not to die in there.” 

He snorts, closes his eyes, and reaches for the mental connection with Rey.

It’s still a wall. Kylo doesn’t care. He broke it down once, he’ll do it again. It could be a thousand feet high, but that doesn’t matter. You break all walls from the bottom.

His first sledgehammer blow against the closed connection rings so loudly in the Force that he feels Sila jump. She mutters something about earplugs, readjusts her grip, and he strikes again, over and over, flooding his mind with memories, feeling the mental wall cracking under the strain.

Sila feeds him power. She’s not the strongest of the Knights by a long shot, but she’s still a better battery than an ordinary human would be. He draws on it ruthlessly. She’ll pay the price for it later, but that’s the nature of the universe. Someone always has to pay.

The wall crumbles.

The last thing Kylo hears before he throws himself down the mental connection is Sila saying into the communicator. “Ban! He’s in."

 

* * *

 

He’s in the desert again.

The sandstorm hasn’t changed. It looms over him, the color of a half-healed bruise. Sand stings his eyes.

He searches for the thread of his scavenger girl’s existence and…there!

_She’s still alive._ His relief is so intense, he nearly falls. It feels weaker than it did before, but it’s still there and he grabs onto it and begins to follow, relentless as a bloodhound.

The wind howls. It’s angrier than it was last time, determined to blow him off his feet, to blast his skin away and strip his bones clean. Korriban is _pissed._

Then the whole world stutters.

For a second, the wind stops. The storm stops. He is charging forward, half-blind, across silent dunes under a sky the color of burning turquoise.

It only lasts for a moment, then the wind starts up again, but Kylo grins fiercely.

It’s working.

Somewhere, _Ravenous_ just shelled the everloving _fuck_ out of the planet’s surface.

The second barrage hits a few moments later. The ground shakes, probably not from the impact—this isn’t the real world, after all—but with a deep subsonic roar that he suspects is the sound of a planet screaming.

(Turning a swath of the desert to glass would probably make Korriban angry enough, but Ban Kalla went looking for a fault line, Kylo Ren knows, and is busy cracking it.)

The sand stops for almost a minute this time, and he uses it to scan the horizon. He doesn’t know how long he’s going to get.

He sees a figure in the distance and breaks into a run.

The sandstorm wails back into existence. He can actually feel Korriban seething under his feet. It is like walking on hot coals. The heat of its rage is impressive.

Still, he’d laugh if he had the breath to spare. Rage is the wrong thing to bring against a Sith. He finds the black tide, finds it cold with fear and despair— _has he lost her is she gone has he failed her_ —and pours it out, making a tiny clear spot against the planet’s fury.

Korriban screams and hammers at him with sand and wind and he walks through it, braced against the wind, following the thread.

The dreadnaught’s weapons are large but finite. Kylo’s not sure how many more barrages _Ravenous_ can launch.

As it turns out, he only needs one.

The storm parts again and he sees her, close enough that he can make out her features. But that hardly matters. He’d know her anywhere, even in the pitch black of space.

“Rey! _Rey!”_

She turns and he sees the look of amazement on her face and the sand starts up again but it doesn’t matter because they’re close enough that he simply lunges up the last dune and catches hold of her.

He wraps his arms around her and swings around so that his back is to the storm and he can shield her with his body. He knows this isn’t the real world, but she feels real. The weight of her against his chest is just as solid. She even smelts like salt and sand and sweat and soap and he knows it’s his mind dredging up sensations to layer over the Force interaction but his mind has apparently been a very keen observer.

His relief is so intense, it cuts like pain. He buries his face in her hair and says “I found you.”

“You came back for me?” she says, gripping the edge of his shirt with both hands. And then, more certain, “You came back!” 

Her astonishment kills him. He wants to find every person who abandoned her, everyone who left her surprised that anyone would come back for her. He wants to find them all and watch them die slow. 

This is not particularly helpful, so he says “Always,” instead. “I’ll always come back for you. I swear.”

She buries his head in her shoulder and he wraps his arms around her and thinks dark and hopeful thoughts.

He could spend a very long time simply standing here, holding her in his arms, but the world shakes again and Korriban moans and he remembers. He pulls back and tilts her chin up with his thumb so that he can meet her eyes. “Where are you now? In—err—reality?”

Thankfully he doesn’t have to explain. Rey shakes her head. “I’m not sure. I don’t think I went far. But—listen, Korriban’s doing something. It’s like I’m sleepwalking. The rest of me, I mean. This isn’t all of me. Shit, this is hard!”

She frees one hand and swipes the hair out of her eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m the part that usually does the thinking. I keep trying to wake the rest of me up. I almost got through a little bit ago, but it’s like Korriban has the rest of me in a trance or something. It's keeping stuff locked down. And I guess I'm the stuff? Does that make sense?”

She looks worried.

“It does. Korriban's mind-controlling you. And I’ll kill it,” growls Kylo Ren, who has a fine sense of vengeance and a limited sense of personal hypocrisy. "I'll burn the whole planet to a crisp."

_Hell, it'd practically be in the family tradition..._

Something grabs him and pulls. It feels like something’s got his arm but when he looks up, nothing’s there.

_Sila. Something’s happening out in the real world. Dammit.  
_

“Listen,” he says to Rey, or at least the part of her he’s found. “I’m getting pulled back. But I will come back for you.”

Another impatient yank.

She nods. And then she smiles up at him and says “I know. I trust you.”

He is standing a hellish sandstorm generated by a planet that hates him and thus the skies do not part and angels do not sing but inside his head, they come pretty damn close.

He’s probably only got a few seconds left, so he locks his mouth over hers. Her lips taste like salt from the desert, but her mouth is sweet and he fades back into existence with the taste of her on his tongue and then Sila smacks him very hard in the ribs and says “Big guy, _we have a problem!”_


	31. Chapter 31

Kylo snaps back to the real world and gets about a third of a second before the headache slams into him. It feels like a krayt dragon is gnawing on the top of his head, one fang jammed square in the left eye socket.

He has had so many terrible headaches in the last few days that he isn’t even surprised any more.

_This girl is just one headache after another…_

Wincing, he shoves the heel of his hand against his left eyebrow and says “What is it?”

Sila is propped up on one elbow and looks like she’s been dragged behind a landspeeder for a bit herself. Kylo’d been ruthless about the power he took from her, not that either of them expected any different.

She points.

Kylo Ren follows the direction of her finger and goes very still.

There is a figure standing in the entrance of the courtyard.

At first he thinks it’s his scavenger girl and then he thinks it isn’t and then he doesn’t know what to think.

It looks like Rey. It’s shaped like Rey. But she is coated from head to toe in red-orange clay or mud or dust or something like that, the same red-orange color as Korriban’s soil. It’s thickly layered over her clothes but on her hands and across her face, it’s dried like the surface of a parched lake bed, cracking like scales.

The only thing that makes him think that it’s really her and not some strange construct by the planet is the fact that she has human eyes and when she speaks, he can see a human teeth and tongue.

 _“Leave this place,”_ she says, and her voice isn’t anything like Rey’s. It’s too deep and it has a hiss underneath it like blowing sand and it sounds like an echo of some other, greater voice, too loud for him to hear.

“I told you,” says Sila grimly, “it’s a problem.”

Kylo gets to his feet. He has to shove the pain of the headache aside and he’s going to pay for that later, but so be it.

“Rey?” he says uncertainly.

She looks at him. Her chin is lifted to an imperious angle that he can’t remember her ever having in life.

 _“We are Korriban,”_ she says.

“I hate it when they talk about themselves in plural,” mutters Sila. “It’s never a good sign.”

“Let her go,” says Kylo, taking a step forward.

Korriban-Rey gives him a contemptuous look, unimpressed with this demand.

“I’ll leave if you let her go,” says Kylo. “I’ll take her and leave you alone.”

_And then I will bring the entire fleet back here and I will use this planet for artillery practice until it cracks open like an egg…_

He takes another step forward. She is utterly still. The red-orange dust coating her barely stirs when she breathes.

_It covered her in its dirt. That’s…I don’t know, the essence of Korriban there. Dirt. Rock. Soil._

_Of course, how else would a planet claim someone…?_

He reaches out to touch her face, thinking to wipe the dust away from her cheek.

She throws him across the courtyard.

Being who he is, his first thought is always retaliation rather than defense. The counterattack is barely half-formed in his head before he slaps it down hard—god only knows what it would do to her in this state, it might do nothing or he might actually manage to kill her—and this leaves him very little time to contemplate the fact that he’s about to hit a wall at speed.

_I have made a slight tactical miscalc—_

He’s about six inches from impact when the air around him turns the consistency of bread dough.

Kylo sinks into it and it actually goes _squelch_. Air does not usually squelch. It even _smells_ like flour and yeast. When he hits the stone wall he barely feels it.

Sila, without fanfare, topples over on her side and mutters “Ow.”

He picks himself up. The air goes back to normal. Korriban-Rey hasn’t moved. “Sila?”

“Yeah,” she says. “You only get one of those, big guy. I’m about done. Next stupid thing you try, you’re on your own.”

Kylo slowly crossed the courtyard again. He holds both hands up, in what he hopes is a non-threatening gesture, although it’s a planet, so who the hell knows what it considers threatening?

He tries a different tactic. “Rey. Rey, I know you’re in there.”

Do her eyes flicker? He can’t tell.

“I saw the…the other part of you…earlier. I know Korriban’s doing something to your mind. I won’t let it keep you.”

_“You cannot stop us.”  
_

He looks with the Force and the crystal brightness he’s used to seeing, cracked or not, is coated in thick mud. No light is getting in or out. She’s fully engulfed by Korriban now.

He takes a deep breath. His instincts are to attack. Surely those are entirely the wrong instincts right now.

Surely.

And then he thinks, _Fuck it, they’ve worked for me this long,_ and says “Sila, call in another strike.”

Sila toggles the wrist communicator and says “Ban, blow something else up.”

“Acknowledged,” says the Twi’lek.

Korriban-Rey stares at him. He stares back. How much does the planet comprehend? Does it know what a ship is? Does it know what’s going to happen?

A moment later, she staggers, nearly falling. He tries to catch her, realizes that he’s going to get thrown across the room again, and turns the air under her solid instead, until she gets her feet back.

_The planet felt that, anyway…_

The next blast sends Korriban-Rey reeling until she slumps against a wall, arms wrapped around herself. Her pupils are hugely dilated and she breathes in short, pained gasps.

 _Ravenous_ is relentless. There is little in the galaxy that can match the power of a dreadnought and somewhere, the crust of Korriban is taking a beating.

For Kylo Ren, it is a strange, torturous performance. Korriban-Rey’s body shudders with every blast, her fact contorted in pain. Each breath rises almost to a shriek. _Ravenou_ s is a quarter of a planet away, much too far to feel the bombardment, but he can track it simply by watching her face.

The tends in her neck stand out in a silent scream. Tears make snail tracks down her face, sluicing the dust away from pale skin. It is like watching her being tortured in the throne room all over again. He survived that by drowning his feelings in the black tide. He does not know if either of them will survive this.

 _If I was a good person,_ he thinks, bleakly amused, _I would call off the strike to spare her pain._

_How fortunate for us all that I am not a good person._

The nails of his ungloved hand dig into his palms. In the back of his head, he hears something odd. It sounds almost like music. He shakes his head to clear it.

“Give her back,” he tells Korriban, “and this stops.”

 _“No,”_ grates the planet, sounding less and less human, the harmonics getting louder and louder.

Sila taps the communicator and says, as calmly as if she wasn’t lying in fetal position watching a planet being tortured, “ _Steadfast,_ route your targeting computers to _Ravenous_ and fire on their mark.”

“Routing now,” says a voice that Kylo Ren vaguely recognizes as Steadfast’s gunnery officer.

 _“It will not work!”_ shouts the planet _. “We will not give her up! We were alone and we will not—“_

 _Steadfast_ is only a star destroyer, but it’s also much closer overhead. Kylo actually sees the flashes as it fires and sees a plume of dust erupt far across the desert.

Korriban-Rey throws her head back and screams. _“No! Never! We will not be alone again!”_

“You’re going to kill her if this keeps up,” says Kylo, as if the thought doesn’t terrify him, “and then you’ll be alone anyway. Give her back now, and this stops. While there’s still something left of you to save.”

The planet snarls a laugh at him, shaking her head. _“No. It is not enough. You will not break us so easily, Sith child.”_

“Ban,” says Sila into the communicator, “can you hit it any harder?”

“Weapons are at full capacity. _Steadfast_ ’s too. This is as much as we have.”

“Shit.”

Kylo Ren’s heart sinks.

 _“Not enough,”_ Korriban-Rey tells him _. “Not enough. We are a planet. We endure. And you are not even a shadow of those who came before you…”_

She begins to advance on him. Every step is slow and dragging, but it seems as if the ground shakes under her feet. Stones slide from the canyon walls and dust filters from overhead.

The planet is angry. The planet is coming for him.

_Is this how it is going to end? Snoke could not make me kill you, so now Korriban will? Is this going to be our destiny, and everything we do is only to delay the inevitable?_

The music in his head keeps playing. Fuck, he can’t do it. He can’t bring himself to kill Rey, even in self-defense. Maybe if she goes for Sila—maybe once she’s got her hands around his neck—but all he can do is take a step back, and then another one, and then there’s stone against his back and there’s nowhere left to retreat.

Korriban-Rey lifts her hands.

“Hey, Sila,” says a completely new voice, tinny and jovial over the wrist communicator, “what’s going on here? Am I late to the party?”

Kylo Ren hasn’t heard that voice in _months._

Sila smashes her palm down on the communicator and shouts _“Skale! Transfer_ Earthshaker’s _targeting computer to Ban NOW!”_

“Transferring,” says Skale, suddenly all business. “All yours, Ban.”

“Firing,” says Ban.

 _Who the hell called for_ Earthshaker?

A moment later, two dreadnoughts are firing on Korriban’s surface. Somewhere, Ban Kalla is hammering on the planet’s crust like a frustrated keyboardist.

The effect of two dreadnoughts on a volcanically active planet is extraordinary. Most civilized worlds have seismic stabilizers in place, but Korriban is old and empty. Fault lines rip loose like torn seams. A volcano belches ash and others begin to smoke as magma pours into long-abandoned channels.

Korriban-Rey drops to her knees, gasping.

Kylo can’t help it. Maybe it’ll get him killed. So be it. He goes down on one knee beside her, tries to lift her up. “Rey! _Rey!_ Damn you, Korriban, let go!”

“ _You win,”_ says the planet’s voice dully _. “We will be alone. Stop. You win.”_

Sila props herself up on one elbow, finger poised over the communicator. “Big guy?”

He nods.

“Ban, hold fire.”

The planet shudders, this time with relief. Rey collapses into his arms. Through the connection, Kylo can see the smothering clay around the crystal begin to dry and flake.

One by one, the flakes begin to fall away.

He exhales.

"Right," he says. "Now we just have to get everybody the hell off this planet."

"Yay..." says Sila, and chooses that moment to politely lose consciousness.


	32. Chapter 32

Getting everyone back to the shuttles takes some doing. Kylo is still mulling over how to carry two unconscious people, one of whom is built like the proverbial brick shithouse, back out of the canyon when Sila’s pilot appears in the courtyard. 

She’s a tall human woman with iron-gray hair in a short, military cut. She looks at him and says “Where is Commander Rakkar?”

He points. She nods, goes to Sila’s side, and begins administering first aid, which in this case is a stimpatch and a couple of painkillers.

“How did you know to come?” he asks.

“Biosignal trackers are mandatory among Commander Rakkar’s personal guard,” says the pilot, as if this should be a blazingly obvious safety precaution.

_Which, if you trust your personal guard, it probably should be._ Kylo mulls over that for a moment, and Sila wakes up and says “Gaaaahhhhh my mouth tastes like dirt.”

“You faceplanted in it,” says Kylo. “I assume you were the one who called _Earthshaker?”_

“Yup,” says Sila. “About four hours ago when I went to _Steadfast._ Ban didn’t think he’d have enough firepower.”

“You might have told me.”

“You seemed preoccupied. Anyway, god only knows what freaky connection you’ve got to that girl and how much of your brain Korriban could see into through it. I figured it was safer to keep that one on a need-to-know basis.”

“…I’m your supreme leader,” he says, quite mildly, since she’s not exactly wrong.

“Yes, yes. Sorry, your supremeness. Won’t happen again.”

_Until the next time_ , Kylo mentally adds to that. Well, this is what he gets for having clever Knights.

The pilot heaves Sila to her feet, partly supporting her. The expression the woman gives Kylo Ren is absolutely neutral, but he barely requires Force powers to read the very large _Fuck you for hurting my commander_ that is stamped across her soul right now.

Even if he had a drop of energy left to his name, he wouldn’t punish her for that. He’s been on the other end of that equation too many times. She’s just lucky he’s not Snoke, that’s all. 

He picks Rey up. She’s out cold. Probably Force shock, but he wants good medical computers to look her over, not the piddly little medbay droids. There may be injuries he can’t see under all this mud. 

“I’m taking her to _Ravenous_ ,” he says, scraping the earth away from her cheek with his gloved hand.

“We’ll all go,” says Sila. “Apparently it’s a party, now that Skale’s here.”

“Skale still trustworthy?”

Sila wobbles a bit and the pilot steadies her. She makes a maybe-yes-maybe-no gesture with one hand. “For me? Yes. For you?...probably. He’s chafing pretty hard at the First Order right now, but I imagine he’s hoping that you’ll change things to his liking.” She considers. “He doesn’t know you’re here yet. I might have just said I needed some help with a cake. Honestly, I’d suggest going to _Ravenous_ anyway, though. In case Skale _has_ gotten any funny ideas, he’d have to cut through another dreadnought to get to you, and…well, I’d rather not see my ship opened up like a tin can.”

Kylo nods. “I suspect the Order’s not terribly pleased with me at the moment either,” he says dryly, adjusting his grip on his scavenger girl. “Since apparently now _two_ dreadnoughts and a star destroyer have been diverted on my orders.”

Sila coughs. Like most Sith, she is immune to guilt, but something flashes briefly across her face that is at least a cousin to it. “Ah…hmm. Yes.”

“Something _else_ you want to tell me about, Sila?”

“Not that I _want_ to tell you about, no...”

It is difficult to advance menacingly on someone when you are carrying a half-dead Jedi in your arms, your clothes are covered in orange dirt, and they are furthermore being held up by a junior officer who is looking daggers at you and can, sadly, probably take you in a fight right now.

He tries anyway. “Sila…”

“Oh dear, stimpatch is wearing off,” she says, clutching dramatically at her chest. “Everything’s getting dark. Talk later…”

“You’re not fooling anyone.”

The pilot clears her throat in a meaningful fashion.

Kylo Ren sighs, hefts Rey, and mutters “This isn’t over.”

“…so dark…”

He gives up and lets the pilot lead the way back to the shuttle.

He has to release the dead man’s switch on his own shuttle so that it can clear atmosphere, but Sila makes a suspiciously miraculous recovery and suggests they all use hers to get to _Ravenous._ “I’m not saying Skale’s a traitor,” she says cheerfully, as the medical computer tsks over her, “but I’m saying he won’t blow me out of the sky.”

“ _Ravenous_ would provide cover fire.”

“Sure. You wanna flip a coin over which of us Ban will cover first?”

Kylo Ren curls his lip in annoyance, but she’s not wrong and she’s looking out for his best interests, after all. “You sure _you_ don’t want this Supreme Leader gig?”

“Will I have to deal with that Hux guy?”

“Afraid so.”

“Then hell no.”

He’s nearly sure that Skale isn’t a traitor, but nobody ever died of an excess of caution, so he stays off the com while Sila hails _Ravenous_. “Got some people who need medical,” she says cheerfully. “And I want to punch Skale in the arm.”

“You are cleared to land, Commander Rakkar.”

It turns out to be for the best. Shortly after they leave atmosphere, Rey cries out in sudden anguish. He’s only a half-dozen steps away, but he clears it in a heartbeat, knocking the medical droid aside.

She doesn’t regain consciousness, but he feels a terrible sense of loss echoing through the Force bond, a hollow grief as she loses whatever Korriban gave her.

He can’t do anything about that, so he picks her up and holds her, even though the medical droid is making alarmed noises at him.

_It’s all right. I’m here. I’m still here._

He doesn’t know if that helps her at all, but he isn’t willing to put her down again, droid or no droid.

To Kylo’s mild surprise, Ban Kalla meets them in the docking bay. The Twi’lek only has two guards with him. “Welcome aboard _Ravenous_ , sir.” He inclines his head politely to Kylo, head-tails making a respectful pattern, then gestures the pilot aside and takes over supporting Sila. To Kylo’s much more intense surprise, the pilot allows this.

“What the hell, Ban?” says Sila, looking up at him. “I got people for this. Go run your ship.”

“I was informed that you required medical attention.”

“I fainted. It’s nothing. People faint all the time.”

“You do not faint.”

“I might. You don’t know. I might faint constantly.”

“Your entire medical history includes only three losses of consciousness, one of which was after after a concussion, one after a childhood drowning incident, and one following explosive decompression of your shuttle.”

“How the hell do you know _that?”_ Sila sounds outraged. As Ban Kalla is clearly steering them toward the medical bay, Kylo is content to let them bicker.

“As I technically outrank you, I took the liberty of reviewing your records. I had them transferred to our medical computers.”

“Technically outrank—! _Bullshit!_ Your ship’s just bigger!” 

“Now Sila, it’s not the size of the ship…” says Kylo, who can’t possibly let that line pass. 

“That’s just what we tell you so you’ll shut up about it!” she snaps over her shoulder.

“I _do_ have a very large ship,” says Ban, wearing his most tranquil expression. A passing Stormtrooper trips on perfectly flat deckplates and tries to pretend he didn’t. “And furthermore, your pilot sent very specific details about what first aid she has administered. I am certain you do not wish me to upset such a conscientious young officer.”

“Also the stimpatch wore off very quickly,” says Kylo helpfully. “You were saying how everything went dark.”

“I’m gonna go get my own Death Star and blow this whole place up. With all of you on it,” grumbles Sila. “And I'm going to eat brownies while I do it. _Then_ you’ll be sorry.”

“Indeed. _After_ the medical droids have given you a clean bill of health.” The Twi’lek taps a door plate and the door opens, revealing a line of beds and waiting droids.

Kylo sets his scavenger down on one and a droid rushes to begin analysis. He turns in time to see Ban pick Sila up bodily—she squawks—and place her on the next bed.

“If I didn’t have such a headache, I would give you _such_ a thrashing, Ban!”

“You may name the time and place at your leisure, Commander Rakkar.”

Kylo stifles a tired laugh and starts to sit down in a chair next to Rey. Ban Kalla looks up and clears his throat. “Sir,” he says. 

“What?”

“You _also_ require medical attention.”

“I’m fine.”

“That is not the report that I have received.” 

“Pick _him_ up, why don’t you?” grumbles Sila, while a medical droid makes soft electronic tutting noises over her.

“I…wait, what?” 

Ban advances on him—not exactly menacingly, but certainly determinedly. “You are displaying clear signs of overuse of the Force and physical exhaustion.”

“I mean, you did _basically_ just arm-wrestle a planet for your girlfriend…” 

“Don’t help, Sila.”

“Not so funny _now,_ is it, big guy?”

Ban folds his arms and looks tall and implacable and polite. It’s the polite that wins. That, and the headache that’s starting to come hammering back. 

“Fine,” mutters Kylo with poor grace, and heaves himself up on the next bed. He turns on his side so he can watch Rey. A medical droid is already patiently sponging dirt away from her skin.

The Twi’lek smiles. “I will have staterooms prepared,” he says gently. “Skale will come aboard tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours, by which time you should both be fully recovered and rested. I am certain that we will all have a great deal to discuss.”

He leaves. The medbay lights dim a little. Kylo feels a sting in his arm as the medical droid feeds something into his veins.

“I’m glad he’s on our side,” he says, to no one in particular.

“You only say that because…he didn’t…pick you up…” Sila mumbles and then starts to snore, leaving Kylo and the silent droids to watch over the bay alone.


	33. Chapter 33

Rey wakes in darkness.

She’s in a bed and she isn’t alone.

She knows immediately who it is, of course. Years on Jakku left her pretty well hair-triggered, and there’s only one person that her hindbrain has accepted is safe to sleep beside. That he happens to be the undisputed top killer of Jedi in the galaxy is the sort of perversity that she’s about given up fighting.

He’s curled around her, chest against her back, one hand resting on her hip. She’s wearing something loose and not particularly warm, but he radiates heat like a furnace.

The bed is remarkably soft. She glances around the room—some kind of cabin on a ship, but larger than any she’s been in. Certainly not the poor battered _Falcon_. Not Kylo Ren’s shuttle, either. This room is sleek, palatial, and you could probably fit most of the shuttle into it.

She has absolutely no idea how she got here.

The man asleep beside her probably means it’s a First Order ship. This almost certainly means that she’s a prisoner.

This means that she should try to escape…roll off the bed, slit his throat in his sleep, get out the door and find the docking bay, steal _another_ shuttle…sweet Space, she’s going to have an entire collection of First Order shuttles by the time she’s done…evade the fighters that will certainly scramble after her, get the hell away…

It seems like a lot of work. And the bed is very comfortable and Kylo Ren is very warm.

And god help her, she feels safe. 

How the hell did she get here? The last thing she remembers was being down on the planet Moraband and she woke up early and she’d been in his arms then, too, but the bed had been much harder, and she got up and there was a voice and she went toward it like she was going home and she was home, the planet Moraban—no, _Korriban_ —was with her

(but also she was frightened)

and then everything goes hazy with pain and the skin of the planet being scoured away

(but he came back for her)

and then her home was torn away and the place she’d belonged, however briefly, turned its back because she had brought pain with it… 

Rey feels as if her chest is drawn as taut as a harp string and something plucked it, releasing a note of sorrow and infinite loss.

Well, she thinks with bleak humor, I suppose once you’ve been abandoned by an entire planet, everything else has to seem minor in comparison, doesn’t it? 

She doesn’t realize Kylo’s woken up until he moves, pulling her against him. He doesn’t say anything, just holds her so tightly it’s almost painful, but that’s what she wants. Someone to hold her together so she doesn’t break apart. 

She doesn’t cry. She is so damn tired of crying. She shakes with sorrow and loss and rage (yes, there’s always rage, she should just get used to it, rage isn’t a thing that she _has_ , it’s a thing that she _is_ ) and at the end of it, he’s still there.

Her one constant in the darkness, since all this began.

 

* * *

 

 

When the computer finally beeps to tell him that he has to get up to make the meeting, Kylo Ren sighs against his scavenger girl’s hair.

She’s asleep again. She woke in the night, trembling, and he held her, and then she fell asleep again. The medical droids told him that it would be normal that she tired easily for a few days. Maintaining the bond with Korriban had apparently taken a great deal of her own energy, although she had barely known it at the time.

He doesn’t want to get up. Even being elsewhere in the same ship feels like he’s abandoning her. But he has Knights to meet with and political calculations to make and plans to put into motion.

He kisses the nape of her neck and breathes in the scent of her hair. For a moment, he can hear music in the back of his head, but then he pushes back the covers and it fades as if it were never there.

 

* * *

 

 

Commander Skale’s a slim, brown-haired man with an open, boyish face and a fondness for things that explode. When the guards announce him, he walks into the conference room, sees Kylo, and rushes him.

Both Ban and Sila sit bolt upright, lifting their hands, ready to use the Force if necessary—but Skale throws his arms around Kylo and says, in a cracking voice, “Shit, brother. Shit. You made it out.”

“Made it out?” says Kylo, returning the hug, but baffled.

_“Shit.”_

There’s nothing coming off Skale but pure relief. No treachery, nothing hidden.

It takes a minute. A Sith’s relief is as passionate as anything else about them. Then Skale steps back, shaking his head. “The Order,” he says simply. “They had you cooped on that flagship and Snoke had you on a nasty chain. I mean, we all heard that you were the Supreme Leader now and whatnot, but…” He shakes his head. “It’s been bad. Real bad.”

Kylo gestures with a gloved hand. “Tell me.”

“The Order’s rotten to the bone, brother. Half the time they’re doing things behind their own back. I lost good people in a raid on a facility I come to find out we already owned, but the goddamned admiral ordered it to prove a point to the governor. I had pilots letting their own comrades blow them up because they wouldn’t fire back.” He shakes his head. “It’s…yeah. The new Republic was worse than useless but the Order’s turning up worse.”

Kylo nods. He’s not surprised. “Are you suggesting we join the Resistance, then?”

“Fuck, I even thought about it.” Skale drops into a chair, then suddenly notices the other two. “Uh. Ban, Sila. Hi.”

Ban inclines his head. Sila snorts and pushes a plate of brownies across the table. “Don’t worry about it. We all pretty much fell sobbing on our glorious leader’s neck the first time.”

Ban, who did nothing of the sort, gives her a look.

“Hey, you looked mildly concerned. For you, that’s practically a sob.”

Kylo sits down. He was expecting to be the one doing the briefing, but he recognizes that apparently he needs to listen right now more than he needs to explain. “Tell me,” he says to Skale, and Skale does.

It’s a dark litany. Corruption. Waste. Lives lost, not for any useful purpose but because one bloated admiral wants to prove to another who has greater power. 

Kylo Ren does not mind slaughter but he abhors inefficiency. Apparently the galaxy could have been conquered years ago if people weren’t so goddamn _stupid_ about it.

This is depressing.

He looks to Ban and Sila. “Can you corroborate this?”

Sila shrugs. “It doesn’t happen so much in my sectors,” she says, “but that’s no reflection on Skale here. You know I’ve got ‘em all by the brainstems. From what I’ve heard, Order’s a lot more like what _he’s_ dealing with than what _I’m_ dealing with, most places.”

“Ban?”

Ban strokes his lekku over the console table and brings up a holographic map of First Order space. “ _Ravenous_ is not assigned to any given sector,” he says. “We go where firepower is needed at any given time. I would say, based on my observations, that Skale is correct, and that furthermore, the problem is spread here, here, here…here…” He taps areas of space, highlighting them in green. By the time he is finished, the areas that aren’t green are reduced to a few dozen sectors and the core First Order worlds. Kylo knows most of those are either sparsely populated or assigned to a Knight who is skilled at either Persuasion or at intimidation.

“What about that one?” he asks, poking an unlit sector.

“Phasma’s old sector,” says Ban. “I believe they are…ah…somewhat cowed.”

Well, it figures. 

“We may assume,” says Ban, “that the Knights have been given the…less optimum assignments. I would not presume to speak for corruption in the core. It is likely that we are seeing the worst of the Order’s inefficiencies. Nevetheless, what we do see is a striking pattern of mismanagement.”

Kylo leans back in the chair, arms crossed, and tilts his head back. One of the spare chairs folds in on itself in a shriek of twisted metal.

“None of you told me.”

“Until about two weeks ago, you couldn’t have done a damn thing about it,” says Skale. “And anyway, we knew if you tried, the old man would—“

He cuts off, because Sila pretty obviously kicked him under the table.

“It’s fine,” says Kylo, waving her off. God help him, theoretically Supreme Leader of about half the galaxy, and his most trusted advisors are kicking each other under the table like small children. “Say what you’re going to say.”

Skale looks at Sila and looks glum. “Well…”

Ban shakes his head and says, in his dry, deliberately emotionless voice, “There has been a general feeling among the Knights that if you were informed of our situation, you would attempt to fix it. You would have been unsuccessful, but you would have suffered a great deal in the process.”

Kylo pinches the bridge of his nose.

His faithful, gallant Knights. They were protecting him. He can read perfectly well what Ban isn’t saying—that they’ve been reluctant to act against the Order because Snoke had him.

_My Knights. Here I’ve been thinking I sent them away to save them from Snoke, and they all thought I was a hostage against their cooperation._

Loyalty is given from both sides. He is so proud of them in that moment that it feels like he’s been stabbed and he’s afraid for a second he’s going to choke up, so he destroys another chair instead. 

One of the many mistakes that the Jedi made over the years was assuming that Sith don’t have friends.

“All right,” says Kylo, when the chair has been reduced to splinters and twisted metal. He leans forward. “I want to hear everyone’s plans—and don’t tell me you haven’t been plotting to overthrow the Order, Sila, you plot that shit in your sleep. Let’s see how much of this mess we can salvage.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'm just gonna write some hurt-comfort with maybe some smut," I said. "Get into the fact that Rey's angry all the damn time. Won't take long," I said. 
> 
> Two sentient planets and some OC's later, and hey, let's overthrow the First Order and not think about the fact that I've written novels with shorter wordcounts than this sucker. 
> 
> *mutter*


	34. Chapter 34

Rey wakes for the second time to find that she’s alone. 

She tells herself that she doesn’t feel bereft at all. She gets out of bed and uses the ‘fresher. There are small bruises on her inner elbow that tell her she’s been injected with something, probably by a medical droid. She wonders vaguely if she’s been interrogated, but she doesn’t feel particularly interrogated and also she’s got very little useful information to give them. Kylo Ren already knows most of her crimes and he seems strangely loathe to broadcast them to the galaxy.

She rakes her hand through her hair. Her head aches, but it feels more like lack of food than anything medically telling. She drinks a glass of water and that helps.

Well, now what? Does she try to escape? Break out of the cabin and go find Kylo and demand…demand…something. Shit. She has no idea what to do next. She’s been a prisoner of the First Order so many times that she’s just not even worked up about it any more.

If she’s going to escape, she could use some clothes. She’s wearing some kind of shapeless caftan in medical green. The closet is full of black uniforms, but presumably they belong to Kylo Ren, and she’s not going to go wandering the ship wearing one of those. She’d need like five belts just to keep it on.

Her staff’s gone, her pack missing. Probably still on Korriban. She shudders at the thought of going to retrieve it. It would be like going to your ex’s house to pick up your stuff, only your ex is an entire planet and also you’re pretty sure something shady was going on with your brain. She has a strange memory of Kylo Ren in a sandstorm, staggering over a dune to get to her, and that can’t be real because there wasn’t a sandstorm (unless there was?) and it’s all hazy and wrapped up with Korriban’s need for people, any people, and…yeah, she’ll miss that staff, but she can get a new one.

Ugh, Luke’s lightsaber was there, too. _Dammit._

The door opens.

A room this large should not be so totally devoid of weapons. Rey snatches up the first thing that comes to hand—the water glass—and hefts it to throw.

There’s a short, plump woman in the doorway with aggressively curly hair. She’s wearing the uniform of the First Order, but with the addition of a black over-robe that smooths the stark lines.

She holds up both hands and says “Don’t shoot?” 

Rey looks at her, looks at the water glass, and feels ridiculous. Still, she’s a prisoner, dammit. “Where is Kylo Ren?”

“Commander Ren is meeting with some of his advisors,” says the woman.

“First Order advisors,” says Rey, her lip curling in disgust.

“Well, after a fashion. I can take you to him, but I warn you, the testosterone is getting pretty thick in there right now.” 

Rey lowers the water glass. The woman lowers her hands. “Take me to him.”

“Would you like to put on some clothes, first?”

Rey sighs. She knows that she probably shouldn’t cooperate, but given the choice of wandering the ship in a medical robe…”Yes. Very much.”

“Right!” The woman claps her hands together. “My name is Sila. Let’s see what we’ve got in the closet that will fit you.”

“Err…” Rey is having a hard time maintaining hostility in the face of what appears to be a rather pleasant First Order housekeeper. “Those are all Kylo’s clothes.” 

“They _what?”_ Sila sounds outraged. “The hell they are. This is _your_ stateroom. Granted, the droids had to guess at your size, but something in here should fit…”

“Wait.” Rey looks around the room, then back at Sila. “What do you mean, _my_ stateroom?”

“It’s yours,” says Sila. “Not his. His adjoins this one, but the room’s yours.” She clears her throat and addresses the ceiling. “Computer, who is this room assigned to?”

“Visiting Dignitary Rey,” says the computer pleasantly.

_“Visiting Dignitary?”_ says Rey.

“No one was quite sure what honorific you would prefer, so we went with that.”

“Honorif—I’m a _prisoner!”_

“You’re a guest,” says Sila. “You have free run of the ship except for the generally restricted areas. You may leave at any time.” She wrinkles her nose. “I grant you, given that you don’t have a shuttle, that’s not as useful as it could be, but if you _really_ want to leave, Ban can probably spare a TIE fighter or something.” 

“I…what…” Rey can’t get her head around any of this and finally settles on what’s probably the least important question. “What ship is this?”

“You are aboard the dreadnought _Ravenous.”_

“Why do I have a _stateroom_ on a _First Order_ _dreadnought?!”_

“Because the commander of _Ravenous_ is a gentleman,” says Sila, with obvious affection. 

“He’s a First Order butcher!” says Rey, before realizing that this is not terribly tactful.

Strangely, Sila doesn’t seem offended in the least. “Well, yes. That too. Many gentlemen are butchers and a few butchers are also gentlemen. Ban is both. At any rate, he wished for you to have the option not to share quarters with the…ah…Supreme Leader if you chose. Commander Ren can, let’s face it, be rather overwhelming in enclosed spaces.”

“You can say that again,” mutters Rey, who was working up a head of steam about the First Order and then got diverted at the last minute by the bit about enclosed spaces.

“Of course, Commander Ren was not willing to be completely separated from you. Hence, connecting staterooms. You can even lock the door between them if you want.” Sila raises her eyebrows. “I mean, he’ll just chop through it, but you at least have the option.”

Rey snorts. Sila grins at her, as if they’re sharing a private joke.

Rey rubs her forehead. She shouldn’t yell at this woman. Obviously she’s a housekeeper or something of the sort and her ability to affect First Order policy is limited. And she’s obviously fond of the dreadnought’s commander. But dammit, she seems friendly. No one has simply been _friendly_ since she left the Resistance. 

I will be pleasant to this woman, thinks Rey. She could be a useful ally. Yes, she’s with the First Order, but so was Finn once. She might not be loyal to them. I will be _pleasant._

She sets the water glass down. For no reason she can imagine, she’s starting to relax a little. 

Meanwhile, Sila is rummaging through the closet. “I am going to guess,” she says, flipping through coathangers, “that you would prefer _not_ to wear the First Order uniform.”

“I would not,” says Rey, which is more polite than the _“Fuck no!”_ that was her first thought. 

“Shame,” says Sila. “You’ve got the figure for the lines. Me, I just look like somebody’s overfilled a cannoli.” She yanks out a long, severe black habit, measures it against Rey. “Hmm, you’ll look like a warrior nun. Mind you, some people are into that.”

“It’ll do,” says Rey. “Anything’s better than this.”

“Can’t argue with that.” 

Rey changes in the ‘fresher. She does indeed look a bit like a warrior nun. She wishes she had her staff. Probably it’s too much to ask for the housekeeper to bring her a weapon. 

She steps out of the ‘fresher and Sila whistles. “Damn. The big—Commander Ren will be picking his jaw off the floor.”

“I don’t care about that,” says Rey, having just discovered that she cares very, very much about that. She smooths the material over her hips. “Now, if you’ll take me to—“

Her stomach growls loudly.

“Breakfast?” says Sila.

Rey sighs. “Yes.” Yelling loses a lot of its emotional impact when you’re hungry. And she’s going to end up yelling at Kylo Ren, she knows it. They always end up yelling at each other, if they aren’t screwing each other’s brains out, and then it’s a different kind of yelling…

“Sorry,” says Rey, suddenly aware that Sila had said something. “Lost my train of thought, there.” 

“I said that I baked banana bread this morning,” says Sila, who is apparently the housekeeper _and_ the baker. She didn’t even know that dreadnoughts had bakers. “Come on, let’s go get you some.”


	35. Chapter 35

 Sila steers them away from the mess hall—Rey didn’t think she could stand to eat surrounded by Stormtroopers—and into a quiet corner of the observation deck. The windows show an endless array of stars and the distant shadows of Korriban’s sister planets.

Sila left her for a few moments then and returned with mugs of caf and the promised banana bread. Rey wasn’t sure if she was grateful for the respite or afraid that someone would come up and speak to her.

It had been deeply bizarre to walk through the corridors of the ship beside the other woman. Not in restraints. Not a prisoner. Not even a source of interest from the other crew members. She was surrounded by the enemy _and the enemy didn’t care._

Hell, the enemy is feeding her baked goods. She doesn’t even know how to feel about that. 

They are excellent baked goods, though. Rey’s got no idea what a banana is, some kind of animal they don’t have on Jakku, probably. Makes a tasty breakfast, anyway.

“So you and Commander Ren, eh?” says Sila.

Rey groans into her caf. 

She knows this is not a conversation one should have with the housekeeper, but hell, the woman obviously knows about it, and him. She’d even made a joke about him chopping through the connecting door. “Yeah,” Rey says. “Apparently. I guess.”

“You don’t sound so happy about it, if you don’t mind my saying so.” 

Rey grunts. “I don’t know if I am.”

“We can move you to another stateroom. I don’t know how much use that’ll be, given he’s…ah…” Sila is obviously searching for a phrase.

“About as subtle as a battering ram?” suggests Rey.

The other woman grins. “That, yes. Well, if it’s any consolation, I’ve served under him in the past and he’s never been quite this worked up before. You are clearly having an effect.”

Rey shakes her head. “I suppose it is. He always seems so damn calm about everything.”

“…calm?” asks Sila. “Ah…are we talking about the same fellow? Dark hair, broad shoulders, goes on murderous rampages every so often? We’ve actually got a code for lightsaber damage to the fixtures when he gets in a mood.”

“That’s the one,” says Rey glumly. “But I go on rampages like that too. Apparently. I mean, I didn’t used to, but…” She lifts her hands.

“Don’t worry, I’ll add your name to the code.”

Rey starts to laugh. She can’t help it. “ _You_ sound very calm about this!”

“I’ve been dealing with Sith for quite a long time. Kylo Ren is perfectly capable of controlling himself when he wishes to, he just generally doesn’t wish to. But he also mostly takes it out on the enemy and on furniture, both of which are in near-infinite supply.”

At the mention of the enemy, Rey sits back in her chair. She suspects that most of her friends would qualify as _the enemy._ “What if he runs out of enemies?” she says.

“A man like that never runs out of enemies.”

Rey gazes into her caf and thinks grim thoughts. 

Sila nudges the plate of banana bread closer. “It will be all right.”

“Will it?” she asks wearily. She isn’t sure. 

“It will. Just because you want a thing badly doesn’t mean the thing you want is bad.”

“He’s a _Sith._ Sith are evil,” says Rey.

“No, Sith are _passionate,_ ” says Sila. “That’s the only mandatory bit. The evil is purely optional. I grant you, it’s a lot easier to _avoid_ being evil when you sit on a rock in the middle of nowhere dithering and refusing to feel any emotion stronger than vague goodwill toward the cosmos, but…well.”

Rey stares at her. A suspicion starts to form belatedly in her mind about this housekeeper.

“Look, you want some banana bread?”

Rey transfers her suspicious gaze to the bread.

“It’s not poisoned,” Sila says. “I wouldn’t do that to good banana bread.”

And it finally, finally occurs to Rey to do what she probably should have done the moment that Sila walked into the stateroom. She looks at the other woman with the eyes of the Force.

Sila herself is nearly unchanged, except that she’s wearing black robes instead of the uniform, and her hair is shot with gray. She sits in the chair and looks at Rey with a gleam in her eye that says she knows exactly what the Jedi’s doing.

Behind her, though…

Behind her, there’s a monster. An immense predator, wrapped in shadows, with claws like sword blades. The eyes that gaze out at Rey from the depths are the exact color of Sila’s own.

She drops her mug. Sila catches it with the Force before it even spills.

“What _are_ you?” whispers Rey.

“Sila Rakkar,” says Sila gently. “Commander of the star destroyer _Steadfast_. One of the Knights of Ren.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

She gets over it quickly. Sila gives her that much. She blinks a few times and then she laughs once, mostly at herself.

“So you’re a Sith too,” Rey says, taking another piece of banana bread and shaking her head. “I should have known you weren’t the housekeeper.”

Sila grins. “Nothing wrong with housekeepers. Making people comfortable is important. The head of housekeeping on _Steadfast_ sits on the staff meetings alongside gunnery and engineering.”

Rey rubs her forehead. Sila can see that she’s tired—not physically, but inside. Well, by all accounts she’s had a long few months. Not everybody lives from adrenaline high to adrenaline high the way that Kylo Ren does. Sila has an intense desire to feed her, but this is not particularly significant because Sila has an intense desire to feed everyone. The galaxy would run much more efficiently if it would accept a cookie and a cup of tea and sit quietly while Sila rearranged its system of governance. 

“It’ll get easier,” Sila says kindly. “I know it’s hard right now.”

“I don’t even know if I want it to get easier,” says Rey glumly. “It seems like the easy thing to do would be to go to the Dark.”

“Ha!” Sila shakes her head, smirking into her caf. “Oh, hon. If you think embracing a destiny with the big guy—Kylo—is going to be the easy path, I have _terrible_ news.”

Rey starts laughing again. Genuine laughter, although Sila can tell she can’t quite believe she’s laughing with a Sith. “Oh god. You’re not wrong. I want to kill him at least half the time. Maybe three-quarters.” 

“Much easier to do when you’re sharing a bed. You go back to the Resistance and then you’ll have to come all the way back out here the next time you want to fight.”

Rey snorts. “I know what you’re doing.”

_Oh honey, you have no idea what I’m doing.._.

Sila’s pretty sure that Rey is oblivious to what’s going on, at least on the Force level. _Feeling comfortable_ is a terribly insidious power, and Rey’s shields are thick but sloppy and they waver erratically. She pushes a little more energy into the aura, watching the lines of Rey’s shoulders relax imperceptibly.

“What, trying to convince you to stay with the big guy?” Sila shrugs. “I won’t lie, it makes life easier for the rest of us. He spends too much time in his own head. Broods like it was going out of style. At least when he’s brooding about you he’s not convincing himself he’s the galaxy’s most epic failure.” 

“He runs the First Order,” says Rey acidly. Her shoulders start to tighten up again. _Damn._

“So convince him to leave,” says Sila, helping herself to another piece of banana bread.

“I want to,” Rey admits. And then, suddenly, “Wait! You’re _with_ the First Order!”

Sila shrugs again. “At the time, it was the only game in town. These days…well, a lot of us aren’t best pleased with the Order.”

Rey’s eyes narrow thoughtfully. Sila thinks, as Kylo Ren has thought before her, that someone is going to have to teach this girl how to hide her emotions better. She broadcasts every single one across her face.

“Would you join the Resistance?” 

Sila chuckles. “Yeah, they’d _love_ that, I’m sure. You think a star destroyer commanded by a Sith is gonna be welcomed with open arms? But I suspect that a lot of us might be persuaded to stop shooting at them, anyway.” She spreads her hands, dusting off crumbs. “Think about it. You don’t have to decide by the end of breakfast.”

Rey is thinking very, very hard. Sila can practically see wheels turning. 

_And this is the bit where, having planted the seeds, I sit back and let her come to her own conclusions…_

“May I make a suggestion?” says Sila. “I give you this one as somebody who’s fond of the big guy, not as a Sith or a First Order commander or anything else.” 

Rey looks up, clearly amused. “ _Can_ you give advice that’s not as a Sith?”

“Oh, probably not, but humor me.” Sila taps the table. “Figure out what _you_ actually want. You’re getting pulled in ten directions at once by other people, me included. Know what you want to do. Otherwise he’ll eat you alive and you’ll spend your life wondering if you’re with him because you want to be.” 

Rey sits back and stares into her caf. The stars shine outside the window, unimpressed by human concerns. 

After a few minutes, Rey says “Is there someplace on the ships with weapons?”

Sila raises an eyebrow. “Lots. Are you planning to blast your way out?”

“No! I mean…I think better when I’m practicing staff. But my staff’s back on Korriban, and…well.”

“Ah.” Sila nods and pushes her chair back. “The officer’s training salle should be available. Let’s see what we can do.”

 

* * *

 

 

Sila strolls into the conference room perhaps an hour later. She wants to give Rey plenty of time to work her aggressions out before she sends Kylo Ren to join her. The two of them are so much alike that they will either be deliriously happy or kill each other in a glorious mutual destruction. Sila would miss the big guy, but far be it from her to keep someone from their destiny.

The three male Knights have their heads together over the conference table. Skale is proposing a strike on something that seems to involve a lot of explosions. Ban looks politely interested, but Sila knows the Twi’lek’s various forms of polite interest well enough to recognize this one as skeptical. Kylo’s eyebrows are approaching his hairline, but at least he looks amused.

“This would require about ten times as many bombers as we have,” he says. “I remind you that at the moment, our available firepower consists of…well, the people in this room.”

“We could call on some of the other Knights…”

“Rey’s awake,” Sila says. She doesn’t particularly want to get into this conversation, at least not right this minute. 

Kylo stands up so fast he nearly knocks the chair over behind him.

“Where is she?”

“Officer’s salle,” says Sila. “I dug her up one of Ban’s lightsabers. Hope that was all right.”

“Certainly,” says Ban Kalla. “Feel free to arm a Jedi and sworn enemy of the First Order with one of my personal weapons. Would you like to pass her the gunnery codes as well?” 

“Sure, if you’ve got them lying around. C’mon, Ban, she’s going up against the big guy, she needs at least a fighting chance to…oh, he’s gone.”

The door closes after the more or less Supreme Leader. Skale looked from one Knight to the other, then back again. “Do I want to know what’s going on? Why is there a Jedi on this ship? Where did you even _find_ a Jedi?" 

“Himself’s girlfriend,” says Sila.

“…he’s the _Jedi Killer.”_

“It’s a complicated relationship. Look, Ban, I wouldn’t worry. If she gets out of hand, we’ll send the big guy in and they’ll fall into each other’s arms. I swear you never saw two more compatibly damaged people.”

“I shall hold you to that, Sila Rakkar.”

“Anyway, she took the double-bladed one. You never use that one.”

Ban Kalla twitches his lekku in resignation. “It was an interesting engineering feat, but imperfect for my needs. Very well.”

Skale shakes his head. “I can see that I have missed out on a lot. You’ll have to fill me in. After I go back to my ship and make some arrangements. I left a lot of shit hanging to get out here.”

“Sorry,” says Sila, feeling no remorse whatsoever.

“No need to be.” He pecks her on the cheek as he leaves the conference room. “Wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

The door closes behind him, leaving the other two Knights alone.

Ban gazes out the viewing window at the distant stars. “Things are being set in motion,” he says, in his deep, quiet voice. “Things that will change the course of many things to come.”

Sila joins him. They are standing a courteous distance apart, but she can feel the warmth coming off him, in stark contrast to the absolute cold of the space outside the window. “Isn’t that always the way?”

The Twi’lek glances over at her. “Not always on this scale. I am glad you are here, Sila Rakkar. If we are going to war with the galaxy, I would rather have you on my side.”

“Ah…” She grins at him. “I bet you say that to all the Sith ladies.”

She intends it lightheartedly, as she always does, and it surprises her when he does not respond in kind. In fact, he is silent for far too long, and the emotion that comes off him is…distress?

_That_ startles her. She doesn’t like it at all. Her instinct is immediately to alleviate it, but for once, she isn’t sure what to say. 

“Ban…Ban, you know I don’t mean…it’s just me. I don’t actually expect…” Sila lifts her hands, to indicate everything or nothing, whatever he prefers to read into it.

To her horror, the sense of distress deepens.

“It’s how I am,” she says. God, has she been bothering him all this time? She never got such a sense before. “It’s all right. I know what your people are like. You…ah…”

She’s got too healthy an ego to say _I know you can do better than me_ , because obviously he can’t, but she’s also aware that Twi’lek women are famed throughout the galaxy for their grace and beauty and Sila’s mostly famed for her ability to put her boot on people’s necks and then feed them brownies.

“No,” he says, in answer to the question she didn’t quite ask. He moves his head, and the metal lekku rattle. For once, they are graceless and she remembers they are artificial. “Not since I lost these. Among my people, I am considered…damaged.”

Sila puts a hand on his arm. Neither of them are terribly strong Force users, even for the Knights of Ren—Sila is specialized in her gifts, and Ban Kalla is more formidable for his intellect than his mastery—but she gets a sudden wash of emotion before he shuts it down.

_His people looking at him with fear in their eyes. He is broken and less than he was. The metal is frightening and tragic all at once. He would not mind fear, but the fear gives way to pity and disgust, and those he does mind, very much._

“I’ll kill ‘em,” says Sila, suddenly blazing with rage. “Who said that to you? I’ll take ‘em apart.”

Ban looks down at her and smiles. She feels the distress lighten a little or perhaps her own anger is blinding her to more nuanced emotions. “That is why I am glad you are here, Sila Rakkar.”

He puts his arm around her shoulders and even though Twi’lek body temperature runs hotter than human by a few degrees, she gets the oddest sense that he’s warming himself with her rage. 

The gesture is no more than a friend might make. Yet. The possibility of more hangs between them, almost visible, and Sila knows they are both analyzing it, assessing potential dangers, loyalties that might be tested or strengthened. They both know the other one plays deep games.

And yet.

A metal lekku curls against her neck, the touch like ice. Her skin prickles in response. The tip pushes her chin up so their eyes meet. She can see that Ban, at least, has made his decision. 

_Hmm, never kissed a man with filed teeth before. Or tentacles. Well, these little discoveries keep life interesting, as my grandmother used to say…_

How interesting it might or might not be, she doesn’t get a chance to find out, because the door to the conference room opens. “Commander Kalla!”

Ban, to his credit, does not try to pretend nothing is happening. He turns his head, not releasing her, and simply looks at the officer in the doorway. “Yes?” he says politely.

The man’s eyes flicker briefly, but he salutes. “A message, sir. From General Hux.”

“If it is for Commander Ren, you may deliver it directly to him.” 

“No, sir. It’s addressed to you. General Hux orders you to detain Commander Ren at once and place him under guard, as a traitor to the Order.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Sure, let's make the minor character a Twi'lek, I always thought Twi'leks were cool, it's an OC, nobody cares..."
> 
> Twenty-odd chapters and, somehow, a minor OC romance later. "Tentacles? Filed teeth? Those are not my kinks! What the devil am I going to do with this?"
> 
> The best laid fics of mice and men...


	36. Chapter 36

Sila will give Ban Kalla all the credit in the world—he doesn’t drop her. After a pronouncement like that, she wouldn’t have taken offense if he’d pitched her out of the way and sprinted to the door.

But it’s Ban, and Ban’s passions run on a slightly different track than the other Knights. He inclines his head to Sila politely, removes arm and lekku from around her, and faces his communications officer. “Who has heard this message?”

“It was sent to the bridge on an unsecured channel,” says the officer. “The bridge crew, and anyone monitoring communications.”

_Great. Everybody in the ship will know in five minutes, if they don’t already._ If it had been just the communications officer, Sila would have no qualms about twisting the man’s brain into a pretzel to buy them a little more time, but a transmission heard by the entire bridge crew…no, there’s no stopping that from getting out. Gossip moves faster than lightspeed, always has.

Ban’s lower lip curls back in a Twi’lek expression of mild disgust. “He means to force my hand, then.”

“Hux is a worm,” says Sila, for whom “treason” is a long-foregone conclusion.

“He does not care if my officers kill themselves attempting to apprehend the equivalent of a Sith lord,” says Ban. “He is a… _poor_ commander.”

Sila could scream obscenities all day long and not manage the venom that Ban delivers in that one mild statement. She wonders if that’s a thing a human can learn.

“Very well.” Ban nods to himself. “Please send the following message to General Hux with my compliments. As this is a remarkable claim, I will require live verification that it is indeed from the General before acting upon it. I am certain that no one wishes the damage that might result from a channel hacked by the enemies of the Order. In two hours, I will be available at the General’s convenience for a live transmission.” 

The communications officer salutes and flees the room. 

“You bought us two hours. Not bad,” says Sila. “What happens after that?”

“Presumably we defect from the First Order, unless Commander Ren has a better idea.” He frowns, then taps the console table. “Computer, contact Kylo Ren on secure channel, highest priority.”

The computer beeps for a moment. It takes long enough that Sila and Ban glance at each other, unsure whether to be amused or alarmed.

Finally: “Kylo here.” He sounds out of breath, as if he’s been running.

_Now, were they fighting or fucking? I suppose I’d have to flip a coin on that one…_

“Commander Ren, it is critically important that you stay where you are and do not open the door to anyone but Sila Rakkar or myself. We will come to you.”

This is, Sila thinks, entirely sensible. Even if Ban’s crew is entirely loyal to him over the First Order—not something that can be counted upon—there is the concern that someone may see Kylo Ren and attempt to apprehend him out of an excess of zeal before they discover what side Ban himself is on. 

A long, long pause. “Understood. What’s happening?”

“It is best if we explain in person.”

“Hey, is Rey with you?” asks Sila, over his shoulder.

“I'm here,” says Rey.

“I strongly suggest that you stay there as well, Dignitary Rey,” says Ban. “If the two of you are not armed with blasters, the weapons locker code is ‘quasar-55’. Please make use of it.”

“And if you’re killing time waiting for us, the big guy always drops his left shoulder on the swing,” adds Sila. “Has for years. You’ve got enough reach on a staff to go right in over the top and clip him in the ear.”

Static erupts as Kylo Ren sputters. “ _Sila_ …!”

Sila whistles innocently. She can hear Rey laughing in the background.

“Ban out,” says Ban Kalla. He taps the console, then gazes blankly at it for a moment. Sila doubts he’s really seeing it. “So here we are. Things are moving more quickly than I anticipated.”

“Do you need me to go grab your bridge crew by the brains?”

He considers this. “Possibly. I cannot rule it out, but I hope not. If they do not follow me of their own will by now…” He shrugs. “Will you return to _Steadfast?”_

“Eventually. Not until I’m sure you don’t need an extra pair of hands around here.” She doesn’t bother to say it— _Steadfast’_ s crew is loyal to Sila, Ban’s may or may not be, and Ban's ship can gut hers if his crew proves disloyal. “Before the First Order ships start popping up, anyway.”

He nods. This, too, does not need to be said—that the First Order will come, and swiftly.

Sila taps her own wrist communicator. “Hey, Steadfast, it’s Sila.”

“Commander,” says her second cheerfully. “What’s up?”

“It’s Knight-Commander,” says Sila. “We’re breaking with those chucklefucks in the Order. As of now, we are _just_ the Knights of Ren.” She takes a deep breath. _Throw the dice…_ “Send out the word, the cake’s in the oven.”

“Will do, Co—Knight-Commander.”

“Sila out.” She stares at the communicator for a moment and exhales. _So. That’s that, then. All my plans laid and set in motion, and now we see if I’ve doomed us all…_

For the first time in her life, she feels a pang of sympathy for General Organa. She’s made the call. Will anyone answer, or has she doomed her friends to fall alongside her?

Ban is close enough to have felt her tension spike when she spoke the code, even if he doesn’t know the cause. He slides a glance over at her, one eyebrow raised.

She doesn’t tell him. Let it all be on her head, when the word comes down.

“Knight-Commander,” he says, after a moment. “Hmm.”

“Seemed appropriate. The big guy can yell at me later if he wants.”

He nods. “Speaking of which, I suppose we should go and inform him of General Hux’s demands. Will you accompany me?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

She starts to step away from the table, but Ban’s lekku curls neatly around her wrist.

She looks down at it, then over at him. Sitting, he is a little shorter than she is. Not by much. His light blue skin is pale and alien in the artificial light, his eyes dark and very deep, with green highlights far down in their depths.

He tugs her closer. “We are going to war,” he says, in his deep, grave voice, taking her face in both hands. His palms are very warm against her skin. “And I have learned that it is not wise to wait on some things, in hopes that one will do a better job later. _Later_ tends not to arrive.” 

She manages half a nod of assent, and then Ban kisses her.

The first touch is very delicate. Sila has the sense that he is being careful. Perhaps he does not know what to expect, or how much she’ll allow. Perhaps he is simply afraid that humans are fragile.

Well, some of them are. Sila Rakkar burned all her fragility away long ago. She’s not quite foolish enough to bite—not when he’s got a mouth full of filed teeth to bite back—but she opens her mouth over his and a moment later, he follows suit. 

His mouth is fever hot and tastes like some spice she can’t quite identify. She can’t resist running her tongue across the points of his teeth. Curiosity compels her. The tips are blunt, no worse than human canines, really, but the sensation is bizarre. She feels like she’s kissing a serrated bread knife.

_Probably best to keep that particular image to myself…_

It is, at first, laughably awkward. Neither of them have any damn idea what to do with their hands. Ban is clearly a bit puzzled by her hair and she’s not sure what the hell you do with a Twi’lek’s headtails—touch them, don’t touch them, who the hell knows—and finally she comes up for air and just asks outright. “Base of the lekku—good, bad, yes, no?”

“Very much yes.”

“Right!” She goes back to the kiss, making a mental note to read up on Twi’lek erogenous zones—god help her, Ban is almost certainly making the exact same mental note, unless he already did all the reading, he’s prepared like that—and the thought threatens to make her giggle uncontrollably. But she starts stroking her fingers up the back of his neck and over the base of the lekku and apparently that’s good because he makes a growling noise that couldn’t come from human vocal cords and pulls her tightly against him.

It works. Somehow or other, it works. Sila can feel things starting to heat up. Curiosity gives way to enthusiasm. How are those teeth going to feel on her skin? There’s only one way to find out…

Ban Kalla sighs heavily and pulls back. Sila sighs as well and leans her forehead briefly against his. “I suppose we have to go be responsible commanders now, don’t we?” 

“I fear so.”

“When this is all over…assuming we survive…”

“Then, Sila Rakkar, I would be honored if you would join me for an evening.”

“What, just one?”

“I would not wish to presume beyond that.”

“Pff. You’ll be lucky if you _survive_ beyond that.”

“A risk that I find I am very willing to take.”

“Good.” Sila steps back. Damn, she really hopes she hasn’t doomed them all. For obvious reasons, but now she’d die sexually frustrated, and that would just be the icing on a particularly vile cupcake. “Right. Let’s go spring the big guy before he decides to just chop his way out of the ship and walk home, shall we?"

Ban gestures polite to the door. "After you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for slower updates, it's spring and weeding the garden is cutting into my writing time...
> 
> Tune in next time for answers to all the important questions like "What the hell is going on in the officer's training salle?" "Why was Kylo out of breath?" and "Will there be smut?"


	37. Chapter 37

 

Kylo Ren enters the officer’s training salle and inhales sharply.

_The double bladed light saber. Yes. That suits her…well._

Rey moves like a dervish, using the lightsaber like her staff. The blades whine through the air, blocking, thrusting, parrying. He can almost see an invisible opponent going down beneath her onslaught.

He is content simply to watch for a little while. She is beautiful. It did not matter if she was an underfed scavenger rat from a miserable outer planet. Something has broken in him and he is incapable of not finding her beautiful, not ever again.

The severe black she is wearing suits her even better than the weapon. Any Sith would be delighted. It hugs closely over her lean body, curves where she does, hints at what might lie beneath. He can’t take his eyes away.

_Probably for the best that she wasn’t wearing that in the throne room. The Praetorian guard would have gutted me while my tongue was still somewhere around my knees._

Oh, but if she had been…He would not have wasted time talking. He’d have pulled her close and kissed her and made love to her on the floor of the throne room, surrounded by the piled bodies of the enemy. He can picture it now, the smell of blood and burning filling his lungs, her body moving under his, driving into her hard enough to make her scream.

That image bleeds too much into the connection. She becomes aware of his presence and halts. She goes to rest the end of the staff on the ground and then clearly remembers it’s a lightsaber and would melt through the floor, so she switches it off instead.

They stand looking at each other, five paces apart, for what seems like an eternity.

He has no idea what he was going to say. Possibly he’d had some idea before he entered the room, but he looked into her pale, angry eyes and it all fled.

_So angry. So beautiful.  
_

“Well?” she says, her voice shaking.

He strides forward with even less idea what he was going to do when he reached her. Rey lifts the lightsaber in her hands, ready to snap it on at an instant’s notice.

Kylo gets his hand up under her chin. He could easily strangle her, were he so inclined, even without using the Force.

Apparently he is going to kiss her instead.

Her mouth is cool and soft and tastes like…well, like the spices that went into banana bread, actually, he can guess how that happened. He slides his arm around her waist and pulls her hard against him, deepening the kiss, devouring her breath.

Her lightsaber’s barrel lay across his back. If she shot the blades, she could sever his spine. He still has a hand across her throat. He could crush her windpipe before he died.

_If we die, we die together._

The thought does not chill his ardor at all. Quite the opposite. This is exactly what he wants. He held her last night, when she was weak, and he would do so a thousand times, but it’s her strength and her rage that he loves the most.

Judging by the way her free hand grips the edge of his uniform, it’s what she wants, too.

They finally have to break apart because neither one can breathe.

“You came back for me,” she says. “On Moraband. I can’t remember all of it, but you found me in the desert. Didn’t you?”

“I did.” 

The second kiss is harder. Her teeth score a line across his lower lip. His blood is already heating, but this drives him wild. He could drag her down right now, on the floor of the salle, and if any of the officers want to go practice their weaponry, they can damn well wait until later.

She steps back though, and, not without reluctance, he lets her go.

She narrows her eyes. “But it wasn’t Moraband, was it? It was Korriban.”

“It was.” He doesn’t bother to lie. He is immune to guilt, though not regret. He is still not sure if he regrets Korriban or not.

“And you knew.” That was not a question.

He feels the rage blossoming in the room, a sudden furnace blast against his skin. “I did, yes.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “It is a place of the Dark. I thought it would help. I had no idea that planets find you so…err…irresistible.”

 “Help!” She stares at him. “Help what?”

He shrugs again. “Turn you. Obviously. What else can I do? I am worthless for anything but the dark.”

The rage twists and changes. He feels like he’s watched a thunderstorm spawn a tornado. She is still angry at him, but she is angry about something he can’t quite put his finger on.

He spends a minute too long trying to place it and she shoots the lightsaber.

He’s got one of his own, of course, but it takes him precious seconds to pull it off his belt, while she drives him across the salle step by step.

“Don’t say that!” she yells at him. “Don’t even _think_ that!” 

It is definitely not the most intelligent response he’s ever made, but he says “Huh?”

She cuts for his legs with the lightsaber and he smacks it aside. She’s got reach but he’s got strength. He gains a step or two, then sacrifices it in the interest of keeping his head on his shoulders.

“Don’t say that about yourself!"

“Err…what?”

He’d had fantasies about another battle, where the two of them were both enraged, their twin darknesses fighting like great beasts, clawing at each other. He hadn’t expected her to be enraged and him to simply be confused.

“You—“ she growls, slapping the lightsaber against his so that the whine fills the room “—are—not—worthless—“

He retreats from the onslaught. Apparently she is determined to beat some self-esteem into him or carve him up like a ham. Nothing in his life has prepared him for this, so he settles for not losing any limbs.

“I—uh—ahh— _shit!”_

She swings the double-bladed lightsaber wildly. He can stay standing or he can keep possession of his head. He chooses to keep his head, drops flat, snaps off his own lightsaber and sweeps her legs out from under her. She goes down hard on top of him.

The lightsaber very nearly eviscerates them both but he catches it with the Force, hovering in the air bare inches above their bodies.

Her breath is heaving in her lungs. He can tell because she’s sprawled across his chest. Kylo very carefully moves the lightsaber aside, takes it in hand, and turns it off.

There is silence in the salle, except for their labored breathing.

“Okay,” says Kylo, gazing at the ceiling. “If I’m reading this correctly, you just tried to kill me, not because I tried to turn you to the Dark, but because I said—“

_“Don’t say it.”_

“…right. Have it your way. I am marvelously worthwhile and also fun at parties.”

She stares at him and then begins, grudgingly at first, to laugh.

“This isn’t some weird ploy to turn me to the Light, is it?” he asks worriedly. “Because we’ve been through that, and it’s just not going to happen. I’m basically a Sith. It fits me like a glove. I’d be an absolutely shit Jedi.” 

Strangely, this makes her laugh even harder. She slumps forward, forehead against his shoulder, and he can tell it’s a release of tension as much as anything. His scavenger girl is full of undirected rage, looking for an outlet.

Well, that’s fine. He can give her plenty of outlets. Combat. Sex. Apparently hysterical laughter, too.

He really would have preferred the sex, but eh, she’s still on top of him, which has to be worth something.

“You stupid bastard,” she says finally, when she can breathe. “Nobody talks that way about my friends.”

It takes him a minute to parse this. Is she saying they’re friends? Did she just attack him because he insulted himself?

_She’s completely mad. And I’m completely mad for wanting her._

Well, he knew that already.

“Err…I’m fond of you, too?”

She shakes her head, sitting up. She’s straddling him, which reminds certain parts of his anatomy what they were doing before she charged him with a lightsaber. He sets his hands on her hips and begins to feel rather more pleased with the entire situation. 

And it is at the moment that the com unit goes off and Ban Kalla attempts to contact him.

 

* * *

 

 

“Well,” says Rey, once the com goes dead. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“No, it doesn’t.” His gloved hands settle back against her hips. She can feel his hardness under her and she would like very much to do something about it, but it appears that they are in danger and also he lied to her about Korriban _and also he’s a fucking Sith._

Emphasis, perhaps, more on the first bit and less on the Sith bit.

She takes a deep breath. He’s still looking up at her, looking not at all concerned about the fact that they are now in lockdown. If anything, he’s gotten harder, and he’s moving his hips under her, almost imperceptibly, which makes it very hard to concentrate.

Rey tries to remember what the hell she was thinking before the bit where she attacked him and yelled at him. She'd been in a mood, and then he'd said something stupid and the excuse to let her rage out had been right there and now...

 _Figure out what you want_ , Sila had said. Good advice, even given the source.

She stares down at him, trying to remember what she wants, and only able to vaguely think that he’s got stupidly good hair. What’s even the point of the light when the dark gets hair like that?

“So you seem to be in trouble,” she says.

“So it would appear.” He scowls briefly. “Mutiny, maybe. Or Hux is throwing a fit.”

Rey’s lip curls back. “Of course. I forget. You’re the Supreme Leader.”

He shrugs.

“And I’m your prisoner,” she mutters, rolling off him. Annoyed at herself as much as him, that she let herself forget.   

“You’re a guest, not a prisoner,” says Kylo, sitting up. If he’s disappointed, he doesn’t show it. “Hell, it’s not even my ship. You can leave at any time.” He pauses, then shrugs again. “Or at least you can once we’re not locked in here. I’ll even give you a shuttle if that’s what you really want.” 

She narrows her eyes, but he’s telling the truth. She can feel it. He is willing to let her leave, if that’s what she wants.

Through the connection, she feels an echo, almost too quiet to hear. _Because you’ll come back to me. Or I’ll come back to you._

She could leave. And then she’d go…where, exactly? 

“Or you could stay with me,” he says softly. 

“You asked me to do that once already,” she says. Her voice is hoarser than it should be.

“And you weren’t ready then. I’m hoping maybe you’re ready now.”

 _You have that look in your eyes from the forest,_ he’d said to her once. And now he’s looking over at her with the look in his eyes from the throne room. Vulnerable. Hopeful. Waiting for the blow to fall. 

Dear god, she doesn’t want to go.

_Figure out what you want._

She wants to stay. Not to try and bring him back to the Light. Stupid thought. People are what they are and maybe nobody ever really gets saved.

No, she wants to be with someone who looks at her darkness and isn’t appalled. She wants to be with the only person who is always there when she reaches out.

She shouldn't want any of those things, but she does.

But there was something she set out to do, before she first set foot on Korriban. She can’t forget it. She has to save her friends, even if she’s slowly becoming someone she no longer recognizes.

“Leave the First Order,” she says. Her voice is shaking but clear. “Leave the First Order and I’ll stay with you.”

“Done,” he says. He doesn’t even pause.

Rey blinks. She was expecting a fight, expecting to have to persuade him, expecting him—hell, to think it over, even. But again, through the connection, she feels that he is telling the exact truth.

“Really?” she says hesitantly. “You’ll give the First Order up?”

“I don’t even—“

The com unit crackles to life. _"Don't shoot!"_

The door opens a moment later. A tall blue Twi’lek comes through, followed by Sila Rakkar.

“Commander,” says the Twi’lek, nodding to them both. “Dignitary Rey.”

“Guess who’s trying to kill you!” says Sila happily.

“Is it General Hux?” asks Kylo.

“Boy, is it ever! The First Order wants your balls on a plate!"

 _"What?!"_ Rey can’t believe it. She steeled herself up to make the ultimate—well, sort of ultimate—sacrifice—okay, not exactly a sacrifice _per se_ , obviously there are much worse things than a Sith lord with great hair who wants to screw you constantly and hold you when you’re sad and murder your enemies—much much worse things—all right, maybe _sacrifice_ isn’t the word she wants—but anyway, she’d steeled herself up for all that and it turns out he has to leave the First Order _anyway?_

She knows she ought to be glad, but she’s mostly just irritated. She should have asked for a star destroyer or a pony or something.

This is a very non-Jedi thought and she examines it from all angles and misses the next few sentences. She comes back in at the Twi’lek saying “I am afraid that there is a non-zero chance that some of my crew will attempt to kill you. It is probably safest for you to move to _Steadfast_ , where your safety can be assured.” He frowns. “But we will have to get you to the shuttlebay undetected, which may prove troublesome.”

Rey surprises herself by laughing. All three of the Knights look at her.

“No worries,” she says, rolling to her feet and picking up the double-bladed lightsaber. “I’m an expert at breaking out of First Order ships by now. Let’s do this.”


	38. Chapter 38

“Do you think she knows that you can just order the corridors cleared?” Sila whispers.

“And miss this?” Ban waves her to silence. “No, let her keep going. I’ve already found three problems with the guard rotations.”

The three Sith were slouching along about fifty feet behind Rey, a trio of dark-clad figures watching her cut a swath through the corridors of the _Ravenous._ Occasionally she’d glance back and Sila would wave encouragingly.

“I think she killed that last guy.”

“He deserved it for dereliction of duty. If he had been at his post and keeping alert, this would not have been an issue.” Ban steps over the corpse.

“It was more an observation than a criticism. How’s she going to get past the—oh, very nice!” Sila makes an appreciative noise as Rey shorts a wire inside a panel and the doors open. 

“I _must_ have those panels reinforced…”

Kylo Ren’s nerves were fraying a bit. There was an excellent chance that Rey could run afoul of some stormtroopers and get herself killed. Also, it was a little annoying to see that getting off Snoke’s flagship probably hadn’t even made her break a sweat. It’s not that he likes the First Order much these days, but you hate to be Supreme Leader of incompetence. 

The three Sith caught up with her while she was attempting to Force Persuade a First Order officer to give her his uniform. 

“You _will_ give me your uniform.”

“I will?” He doesn’t sound convinced.

“’Scuse me, hon,” says Sila. “If you don’t mind…” She reaches out, taps the officer on the shoulder and says “I think you’ll find that giving this lady your uniform will make you very happy.” 

“It will? I mean…yes, of course it will!” He begins stripping out of his clothes rapidly.

“Really?” says Kylo, to no one in particular. _“Really?”_

“It’s always best to make people happy,” says Sila Rakkar. “Particularly if they’re doing what you want.”

Rey vanishes around the corner and comes back a moment later, straightening the First Order uniform.

“You could have just put one of those on this morning,” says Kylo, a bit dryly.

“Then it would have been dressing like a prisoner. Now it’s camouflage.”

He doesn’t argue. He’s mostly just sad that she isn’t wearing the black habit any more. It was a good look. A…very…good look. 

_Down, boy. You’re making your escape. No time for that._

God, he should have made time earlier in the salle. He can vividly recall the feel of her straddling his hips, her body against his, and instead they’d wasted time talking about…what, the First Order?

He’d make time right now, in a closet if he had to, but Sila would have a lot of extremely sarcastic things to say about that, and Ban would be so polite that it _felt_ like sarcasm.

Rey looks him up and down, eyes narrowed. She’s clearly not thinking the same thing he is. “I don’t know how to disguise you. Maybe we should take you prisoner.”

“Let’s not get carried away.”

“If I may?” Ban Kalla clears his throat politely. “This _is_ my ship, after all.”

“You’re the one who said we had to get to the shuttlebay undetected.”

“Indeed, and your methods have been an education, madam. This part, however, I believe I can manage.” He taps the wall. “Computer, activate command override. Lift to this floor, please.”

“He says please to computers?” asks Rey softly.

“Always has,” says Sila. “Says that it’s good to stay in the habit of courtesy.”

There are two guards watching the lift. Rey glances at Ban Kalla. “Do you want to handle them?”

“If you have no objections?” 

She waves her hand. The Twi’lek strides up to the guards, points down the hall, and says “Go and guard the far door for one hour.” The guards salute and break into a run. Ban Kalla gestures to the other three and they climb onto the lift.

"Way to take the fun out of it, Ban."

"If we did not have a deadline, I would be fascinated to see how far she could get. But alas, time is fleeting." Sila grumbles, but doesn't argue the point.

“How are we getting through the shuttle bay?” asks Rey. “Won’t it be heavily guarded?” 

“My private shuttle has a private shuttle deck to go with it.” He stifles a sigh. “Commander…?” 

Kylo cocks his head. 

_“Please_ do not allow Sila to pilot it.”

“Hey! I’m a great pilot! Nobody ever dies!”

“Yes, but you do extraordinary amounts of damage to the trim.”

Kylo slaps him on the shoulder. “I’ll do my best. Can you handle Hux?”

“Please.” The Twi’lek flicks an imaginary bit of dust off his sleeve with a lekku. “How angry do you wish him to be?”

“Very,” says Kylo. “He’s got us outgunned by…well, a ridiculous amount. If he’s furious, that may help.”

“…err,” says Rey.

The three Sith look at her.

“Look, I grant you I’m not a tactical genius, but is your entire plan really ‘make him really mad while he shoots at us’?”

Sila mutters something under her breath and looks at the lift ceiling. Kylo folds his arms. “I’m open to other suggestions.”

“We could run away?”

“Active tracking is in place on all First Order ships,” says Ban Kalla. “I suspect we would not get far.”

“We could evacuate the ships down to Korriban.”

“Yes, feeding several thousand people on the gleanings of a tomb world, which incidentally hates me, sounds like a fine plan. We're not all desert scavengers, you know.”

_Little desert rat_ , he thinks fondly. Rey scowls. He's not sure if she heard that or not. “Fine. What does Hux want?”

“My head on a plate.”

“Why?”

One corner of his mouth quirks up. Trying to explain his long history with Hux would take hours, if not days. “Well, we’ve never been close…”

“He’s a nasty, evil little shit,” adds Sila. “I mean, some of my best friends are evil little shits, don’t get me wrong, but not him.” 

Rey shoves her hands through her hair. Freed of the braids, it is thick and dark and Kylo has a strong urge to sink his own hands into it. “Okay, but why does he want you dead _now?_ You were Supreme Leader like…last week.”

“And I was absent too long, and he has taken this as justification for a coup,” says Kylo. He shrugs. “It was only a matter of time.”

Rey frowns at him as the lift comes to a halt. “So this is why you agreed to leave the Order so easily.”

He has to laugh. The irritation coming through the connection is priceless. “Among many, many reasons.”

Ban Kalla and Sila step off the lift. Rey lags a heartbeat behind and he reaches out to take her wrist. The connection flares open between them. _The main one being you._

She looks up at him, eyes widening a little. Too much? Not enough? He has no idea. Is she still angry with him?

Stupid question, she’s always angry with him. That’s part of the charm. Did she actually mean what she said, in the salle? Will she stay with him?

_Does it matter? When Hux shows up with the fleet, it’s going to be you, two dreadnaughts, and one star destroyer against…everything. ‘Staying with you’ may be a very time-limited option._

He can’t believe he’s got less than eighteen hours left—twenty-four, maybe, if Ban’s stalling worked—and he’s wasting it wandering around between ships when he could be fucking her brains out.

Possibly some of that comes over the connection because her eyes narrow again. He opens his mouth to say something—he’s not sure what—and he hears soft, familiar music in the back of his head. He shakes his head to clear it.

_What the hell is that doing here?_ He thought he’d left Korriban behind. 

The music fades. He catches up with Rey and the other two at the shuttlebay door. _A weird echo, maybe. Worry about it later._

There is a single Twi’lek guard in the shuttlebay. Rey tenses, but Ban Kalla raises a hand to her. “They are loyal to me,” he says. “Not any human.” The Twi’lek guard inclines his head a fraction.

“See that my friends make it safely to Steadfast,” says Ban Kalla. “Protect them at any cost.” The guard nods, turns and lowers the ramp to the shuttle.

Kylo goes first, just in case it’s a trap. He can feel Rey close behind him, but Sila doesn’t follow. He glances over his shoulder to see if she’s on her way.

_…huh._

He was not expecting to see two of his Knights in a passionate embrace, particularly not Ban and Sila. He has a brief mad thought that they’re trying to murder each other, but…well, not unless they were trying to choke each other with their tongues.

Kylo knows he has a bad habit of forgetting that other people have their own lives and their own loves going on around him. Apparently this was another example.

The two disengage. Ban straightens his uniform and looks impassive. Sila grins like a rancor with a hot date.

“If you’re quite finished…” says Kylo.

“I am not even close to finished, big guy.”

“If you’re quite finished _for now.”_

“Aww. Yeah, c’mon, let’s get to _Steadfast.”_

There is an awkward moment as the shuttle door closes. Ban lifts a hand. Sila blows kisses. The Twi’lek guard is so stone-faced that he might as well be carved out of granite. Rey clearly doesn’t know where she’s supposed to look and settles for staring at her feet.

“So you and Ban?” he says, figuring he might as well get it out of the way. He sits down at the controls, not that it requires a great deal of piloting skill to get from _Ravenous_ to the star destroyer.

“We’re working on it.”

“…He files his teeth.”

“That’s the bit that’s taking some getting used to, yeah. Kinda pointy. Still, life is about embracing new experiences! Besides, you _like_ Ban.”

“He is one of my oldest friends. I would take a blaster for Ban,” says Kylo. “I am just not certain if I would…” He trails off.

“Well, _I_ would.”

Kylo stifles a sigh. Rey stifles a giggle. Sila pats his arm. “I’ll keep you posted, big guy.”

“…please don’t.”

They exit the bay and Kylo aims for the band of stars on the far side of _Ravenous,_ when Rey suddenly says “What if you let him capture you?” and he damn near crashes the ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the words of Granny Weatherwax, I aitn't dead!
> 
> But it's spring and there is a lot of work in the garden and also deadlines came crashing down on me like whoa and since I actually do write books for a living, that took all of my writer brain and by the time I handed in the last manuscript, I could just about conjugate the verb "fuck" and not very well. Sorry for the delay! I can't promise that future updates will be any faster, but the fic is not abandoned to the wolves.


End file.
